EXCLUSIVE - Vice President JD Vance: They Tricked Me About Donald Trump, But Everything Changed!

1. 0:00 – 2:58

   Intro

   1. JVJD Vance0:00

      The Biden administration just, like, really screwed up our immigration policy in a profoundly dangerous way

   2. SBSteven Bartlett0:05

      But even if you agree that immigration is a problem, it seems division is the most compelling narrative for politicians. I remember this particular quote about the Black community where he said-

   3. JVJD Vance0:13

      What do you have to lose?

   4. SBSteven Bartlett0:16

      I'm a Black man. I feel like I've got things to lose, and my concern is when the Western narrative is that it's the Brown people that are the reason that your life is hard or, like, Mexicans are [censored] and murderers. If I heard that from my political leaders, it's conceivable that I might be angry at my neighbor even though they've done nothing.

   5. JVJD Vance0:31

      But let, let me just say, very often what the president is accused of saying, he didn't say it or there was much greater context.

   6. SBSteven Bartlett0:37

      You wouldn't have said that about him, would you?

   7. JVJD Vance0:37

      But I, but I, but I think... Well, the president and I certainly have way different styles, but Donald Trump is much different as a human being than the media makes him out to be.

   8. SBSteven Bartlett0:46

      But back in 2016, there was a private message between you and a roommate where you said Trump was either a cynical asshole or America's Hitler. How do you go from that position to-

   9. JVJD Vance0:54

      [laughs]

   10. SBSteven Bartlett0:55

       ... vice president of the same person? What, what is that journey?

   11. JVJD Vance0:58

       A crazy journey, man. But look, I thought Donald Trump would be a failed president. He was not. I thought that America's institutions were fundamentally functioning. They were not. You always have to be able to acknowledge when you're right and when you're wrong. Like, he's so non-conventional in the way that he does everything, that things that were previously unimaginable are actually on the table. This peace deal with Iran, for example.

   12. SBSteven Bartlett1:21

       But there's been lots of false deals.

   13. JVJD Vance1:22

       Well, this one's real, so.

   14. SBSteven Bartlett1:24

       And Israel, Trump called Netanyahu a very difficult guy. What does Netanyahu want?

   15. JVJD Vance1:29

       I don't know. What I would say is that we're different countries with different interests.

   16. SBSteven Bartlett1:32

       Do you trust them?

   17. JVJD Vance1:33

       I don't really trust anybody. But having seen the president of the United States operate, I feel quite confident that they are the junior partner, we're the senior partner. We are the world's superpower.

   18. SBSteven Bartlett1:41

       I'm gonna take a little bit of a hard turn. Um, do you think aliens could be real?

   19. JVJD Vance1:44

       I do.

   20. SBSteven Bartlett1:46

       Mr. Vice President, I had no idea about your earliest context.

   21. JVJD Vance1:49

       Mm-hmm.

   22. SBSteven Bartlett1:50

       And it has informed what I've then seen from you later as an adult, but can you take me back? [sighs] The emotion's still right on the surface for you as well.

   23. JVJD Vance2:02

       Very much so.

   24. SBSteven Bartlett2:04

       This is super interesting to me. My team give me this report to show me how many of you that watch this show subscribe, and some of you have told us, according to this, that you are unsubscribed from the channel randomly. So favor to ask all of you, please could you check right now if you've hit the subscribe button if you are a regular viewer of the show and you like what we do here. We're approaching quite a significant landmark on this show in terms of a subscriber number. So if there was one simple free thing that you could do to help us, my team, everyone here, to keep this show free, to keep it improving year over year and week over week, it is just to hit that subscribe button and to double-check if you've hit it. Only thing I'll ever ask of you. Do we have a deal? If you do it, I'll tell you what I'll do. I'll make sure every single week, every single month, we fight harder and harder and harder and harder to bring you the guests and conversations that you want to hear. I've stayed true to that promise since the very beginning of The Diary of a CEO, and I will not let you down. Please help us. Really appreciate it. Let's get on with the show. [upbeat music]

2. 2:58 – 5:54

   How Childhood Shaped Who You Became

   1. SBSteven Bartlett2:58

      Mr. Vice President, I have your book here.

   2. JVJD Vance3:01

      Okay.

   3. SBSteven Bartlett3:03

      And it says, "Of all the things that I hated about my childhood, nothing compared to the revolving door of father figures. I hated the disruption, and I hated how often these boyfriends would walk out of my life just as I began to like them." I always think to understand the people that are sat in front of me, you have to take, get a picture of their early context.

   4. JVJD Vance3:26

      Sure.

   5. SBSteven Bartlett3:27

      And I had no idea about your earliest context.

   6. JVJD Vance3:29

      Mm-hmm.

   7. SBSteven Bartlett3:30

      And it, it has in some respects informed what I've then seen from you later as an adult. But can you take me back-

   8. JVJD Vance3:36

      Sure. Wow

   9. SBSteven Bartlett3:36

      ... to your earliest context and explain-

   10. JVJD Vance3:38

       Okay

   11. SBSteven Bartlett3:38

       ... that quote for me?

   12. JVJD Vance3:40

       Yeah, so, um, I, I was raised in very working class town, very working class family. You know, this is a photo of me when I was a little kid here. And my family, like a lot of other families in similar circumstances, we struggled. We struggled to adapt to middle class life. Yeah, this is my sister and my grandfather. It's interesting, my, my, my grandfather had very low formal education. He graduated from high school. My grandmother actually left school when she was 13. Very religious people, particularly my grandmother, but, you know, they, they struggled pretty much economically for most of their lives. My grandfather died when I was 13. I think my grandmother died when I was 20. And, you know, this is, yeah, this is right, this is probably not even a year before she died, and I was about to go to Iraq, and she was very old and frail, and this is one of the last photos of the two of us, and this is really the woman who raised me because you raised the, the revolving door of father figures. So Mom, amazing person, she's been clean and sober for now 11 years, but she was, was in the throes of a pretty bad addiction problem for much of my childhood, and so this was kind of my savior. This was the person who stepped in and made sure I had a stable life to the extent that I did.

   13. SBSteven Bartlett4:48

       And your grandmother, she got pregnant at 13.

   14. JVJD Vance4:50

       Correct.

   15. SBSteven Bartlett4:51

       And she had a miscarriage at that age?

   16. JVJD Vance4:54

       Yeah, that's right. So think about this, Eastern Kentucky, you're talking about the hills of an extremely impoverished, very rural part of the United States of America. And so, you know, she is dating my grandfather who I think at the time is 16. She's 13. So these are children. She gets pregnant. They move to Ohio for more opportunity because you, you just couldn't build a good life for yourself. There weren't enough good jobs in that part of the world, and she had a miscarriage. So, like, the thing that brought her out of her home, I think hastened them getting married. I don't think they would've gotten married at 13 and 16 were it not for this unplanned pregnancy. You know, she was kind of in it then. So they're married. They have a very chaotic marriage, an abusive marriage in a lot of ways, but they have three kids, my mom, my uncle, my aunt, and the story of our family is, in some ways, some of us were able to kind of break the cycle and some of us weren't, and part of what motivated me to write that book was trying to understand why is it, why is it that life worked out for some of us and didn't work

3. 5:54 – 7:00

   You Were Put Up For Adoption

   1. JVJD Vance5:54

      out for others?

   2. SBSteven Bartlett5:54

      So your biological father-

   3. JVJD Vance5:56

      Yeah

   4. SBSteven Bartlett5:56

      ... he, he put you up for adoption.

   5. JVJD Vance5:59

      So he did. So I was adopted by a man when I was five or six years old by the name of Robert Hamill, and he became, and is still technically, if you look at my birth certificate, he is still listed as my legal father. Now, he was in the picture from, call it I was seven until 10 or 11, and then he and Mom got divorced. He still stuck around for a little bit after that, but by the time I was 12 years old, he was just gone. Never talked to him again, never saw him again. And-

   6. SBSteven Bartlett6:30

      And am I right in thinking this is the, the third man in your life at this point? Because your sister Lindsay comes from a different father.

   7. JVJD Vance6:38

      That's right. So, so her father, a very good guy. She's five or six years older than me, and so he was the first of my mother's husbands. And then my dad, my biological father, was number two, and then my legal father was number three, and then, you know, things sort of got a little quicker from that point forward. So there was a, there was a h- there was more turnover, let's say, in the relationships at that point

4. 7:00 – 8:02

   Watching Your Mother's Relationships Up Close

   1. JVJD Vance7:00

      forward.

   2. SBSteven Bartlett7:00

      There was also a guy called Matt thereafter at 13 years old that your mom had met.

   3. JVJD Vance7:05

      Yeah, yeah, good guy. Very close to him. He actually is very political, and so he and I, um, reconnected a little bit over our shared interest in politics. But he was just a, a good hardworking guy. You know, he was only around for maybe a few years, probably less than that of my life, but he was a, a significant and positive force.

   4. SBSteven Bartlett7:23

      In your book, page 124, you, you say living with Mom and Matt, which is when you were 14 years old, was like a front row seat to the end of the world.

   5. JVJD Vance7:30

      Yeah, yeah. Well, it was just chaotic, right? I mean, th- things that I thought of as normal that I later realized and, you know, talking to my wife or talking to friends, that just a level of relationship instability. You know, fighting, people throwing stuff. If the fights get really bad, some person throws a plate at somebody else. Again, i- it sounds, even talking about it now, kind of crazy, but it was pretty normal back then. And y- you know, sometimes it was worse and sometimes it was better, but there was a sense in which relationships were always just kind of chaotic.

5. 8:02 – 10:33

   How Childhood Trauma Shapes Adults

   1. JVJD Vance8:03

      [laughs]

   2. SBSteven Bartlett8:03

      As an adult, you know, like you can almost imagine now that you've got y- so many kids yourself that-

   3. JVJD Vance8:07

      Yeah

   4. SBSteven Bartlett8:08

      ... I, I can understand the feeling of craziness but being normal, and you kind of don't realize until you see into someone else's world-

   5. JVJD Vance8:14

      Yes

   6. SBSteven Bartlett8:14

      ... or someone else hears about yours.

   7. JVJD Vance8:16

      Yeah.

   8. SBSteven Bartlett8:16

      So I can relate to that in many ways. But as an adult, you must look back on that and now see the, the way that that shaped you.

   9. JVJD Vance8:22

      Yeah. Well, it was very unhealthy. Um, I certainly think, again, it, it was hard to sort of really feel a sense of stability. It was hard to really attach to people because you always assumed that they were gonna be gone. And y- you know, years later I was, I was talking to-- I was actually at a, a conference. I was giving a speech and this guy came up to me, and he was a child psychologist and, you know, he said, "You know, one of the things the literature shows is that people who come from traumatic or chaotic environments and end up doing pretty well, they always have one person, whether it was a teacher or a social worker or a grandparent, aunt, aunt or an uncle. There was a one person who was sort of their anchor, and that seems to be the difference for a lot of these kids." And, and again, I was lucky enough to have that. And I, I think a- about my life a lot of time. I mean, sitting here, I'm the Vice President of the United States. What would my life have turned out to be if you'd had all that chaos, which was just a background part of my life, but you take out those stabilizing forces?

   10. SBSteven Bartlett9:19

       Your grandmother.

   11. JVJD Vance9:19

       God knows, man.

   12. SBSteven Bartlett9:20

       Your grandmother.

   13. JVJD Vance9:21

       God knows. My grandmother, that's right.

   14. SBSteven Bartlett9:23

       'Cause th- through your story when I was reading about your childhood, she seemed like the safe place that you would retreat to-

   15. JVJD Vance9:27

       Correct

   16. SBSteven Bartlett9:28

       ... over and over again.

   17. JVJD Vance9:28

       You know, I was o- obviously, I, I, I think it's very important for boys to have male role models, to have father figures that they look up to. She was in, in an unconventional way, like both a mother figure and a father figure. She was extraordinarily odd, and I mean that in the most loving way possible. But she was just incredibly tough. You know, I was, I don't know, like 12, 13. I was hanging out with one of the kids in the neighborhood who was kind of going down a bad path. He actually would later spend some time in jail, but, you know, he was getting into drugs, starting to smoke weed, starting to do a little bit more than that. Again, 12, 13, so we were pretty young kids. My grandmother found out and she told me that if I kept on hanging out with this kid, she was gonna run him over with her car, and then I was like kind of caught off guard by that. And then she said, "JD, I promise you, and no one will ever find out about it." And I was like, "Whoa." [laughs] So like for the sake of this kid, I pretty much stopped hanging out with him. But that toughness, I think was like a necessary part. It was like through sheer willpower that she kept me on the straight and narrow. And, uh, again, I don't know where I'd be

6. 10:33 – 16:18

   How Addiction Tore The Family Apart

   1. JVJD Vance10:33

      without her.

   2. SBSteven Bartlett10:34

      And over the next sort of couple of decades, your mother, your mother's addiction, um, seems to get worse and worse.

   3. JVJD Vance10:41

      It does. It does.

   4. SBSteven Bartlett10:42

      From prescription drugs to heroin-

   5. JVJD Vance10:44

      Correct

   6. SBSteven Bartlett10:44

      ... and everything in between, and it really sort of ravages not just y- her life, but the family's life-

   7. JVJD Vance10:49

      That's right

   8. SBSteven Bartlett10:50

      ... nearly making your, your grandparents bankrupt.

   9. JVJD Vance10:52

      Yes. And Mom, by the way, has been clean and sober for 11 years, which is an amazing thing. But, you know, when Papaw died, he was-- What my grandmother was for me, I sort of realized that that's what Papaw was for Mom. He was her safe place. He was her anchor. And I think she already had some addiction problems, but it just really accelerated from there and things kind of went off the rails. And, you know, my, my grandparents before my grandfather died, were trying various ways to help her. And yeah, it got worse and worse, harder and harder drugs, had a few bad overdoses. And, you know, by the grace of God, some miracle, you know, it's, it's amazing how transformed she is, and it sort of drives home how for some people, drugs are just-- They, they take so much away from a human being, and she was certainly that, that way. In the same way that they took so much away from her, sobriety has given her a whole lot back.

   10. SBSteven Bartlett11:47

       If I asked your wife-

   11. JVJD Vance11:48

       Yeah

   12. SBSteven Bartlett11:48

       ... how this season of your life, the most formative season of your life-

   13. JVJD Vance11:51

       Sure

   14. SBSteven Bartlett11:52

       ... has changed you, what are all the things she would say? It's funny because-

   15. JVJD Vance11:56

       [laughs]

   16. SBSteven Bartlett11:56

       ... I remember interviewing, I think it was Michael Jordan's coach.

   17. JVJD Vance11:59

       Okay.

   18. SBSteven Bartlett11:59

       And he said to me that people's dark sides and their light sides are like fundamentally interconnected.

   19. JVJD Vance12:04

       Yes.

   20. SBSteven Bartlett12:05

       And I can relate.

   21. JVJD Vance12:05

       Absolutely.

   22. SBSteven Bartlett12:06

       That the things, things people might clap for or applaud about you are also fundamentally linked to the things that [laughs] you struggle with-

   23. JVJD Vance12:12

       Yeah

   24. SBSteven Bartlett12:12

       ... or that make you [laughs] sometimes not the most normal person.

   25. JVJD Vance12:16

       Yes. That makes total sense to me. I think on the dark side, what she would say is I am an extraordinary mistrust- I think of, of people that I don't know particularly well. I sort of assume the worst sometimes about circumstances and, and, and things outside of my control. But I maybe assume the best about the people themselves, right? So there's an inherent, like-

   26. SBSteven Bartlett12:40

       Hmm

   27. JVJD Vance12:40

       ... sense that the world is going to fall apart. I think that's a very true thing. Even in our, like our marriage is, it would be hard to imagine, I'm saying, you know, all marriages are work, but it would be hard to imagine like a marriage that was more successful and more happy than ours. Our kids are doing great. They're healthy. Like my wife and I love each other very much, but we're also just like she really is my best friend. She's the person I talk to about everything. She's my closest confidant. And yet, there are all kinds of times during our 12-year marriage where I've just had this thought, like, "There's no way this is gonna last." Either because she's taking the kids to the grocery store and I start thinking to myself, "Oh my God, a drunk driver is gonna have a head-on collision." I, I, I just, there's a sense of like instability that is very much built in. That's, that's kind of the dark. I think the light is because I've seen a lot of people at their very best and their very worst, I sort of assume the best about the human beings themselves. So even though the circumstances are crazy and even though shit hits the fan sometimes completely outside of your control, I just, y- I, I think what she would say is that I probably have a higher empathy quotient than any person that she knows.

   28. SBSteven Bartlett13:49

       Mm-hmm.

   29. JVJD Vance13:50

       And I really try to understand what makes people tick. And so there's, there's the light and the dark together. But there's, there's a lot beyond that. I mean, look, man, I, I... it was a lot of work. When I look back at our early relationship and we'd have an argument, like before we were married, and, and I'd be like, "Okay, well, fine, let's just break up." And her response is like, "Well, that's crazy. Why would we break up? Let's just like, have a rational conversation." Like I don't, "Honey, I don't do rational conversations [laughs] in this context. That is not something we do." But again, so long as you're, I think, self-aware about that, it's a problem that you can solve. And certainly, I, I mean, I think she would say com- now compared to 14 years ago when we first started dating, it's just night and day. But very early on, it was a chaotic relationship itself.

   30. SBSteven Bartlett14:38

       Clearly an avoidant attachment style, which obviously makes-
7. 16:18 – 18:07

   Why Empathy Is Missing In Politics

   1. JVJD Vance16:18

      did.

   2. SBSteven Bartlett16:19

      That point about understanding the person on the other end-

   3. JVJD Vance16:21

      Yes

   4. SBSteven Bartlett16:21

      ... and having empathy for the human being, politics-

   5. JVJD Vance16:24

      Yeah. [laughs]

   6. SBSteven Bartlett16:25

      ... appears to be almost exact. 'Cause I watch the, I watch the election campaigns. I watch how like yourself and the President went against, um, people like Kamala Harris.

   7. JVJD Vance16:34

      Sure.

   8. SBSteven Bartlett16:35

      So you must, with that logic, think that Kamala Harris is actually like a really good person. Like you must understand Kamala.

   9. JVJD Vance16:40

      I, I don't, I, I don't have, I wouldn't say that I understand her. I would say that I just don't have this animosity towards people on the other side.

   10. SBSteven Bartlett16:47

       But you h- d- is that not like sort of implicit in the job itself that you have to point out their faults and kind of crit-

   11. JVJD Vance16:52

       Yeah, you do. Yeah, no, a- absolutely. But I think you can be sort of rational about it. You can be cerebral about it. Certainly, there are things the other side does that annoy me. But you know, like my, my fundamental bias is that just most people are good people. And to the extent that they do something you disagree with, it's either because they screwed up on something or because they made a mistake or... I just, I've always been like this. I've always been more charitable about other human beings, and I, I don't know. Again, maybe I pro- maybe I do that too much. Maybe I'm too charitable. But I'd rather be too charitable than too cynical about human beings 'cause that, I mean, you talk about a screwed up perspective to take into politics. If you're always cynical about other people's motivations, man, you're gonna be in a very, very bad spot.

   12. SBSteven Bartlett17:36

       I actually think the same about interviewing-

   13. JVJD Vance17:37

       Okay. [laughs]

   14. SBSteven Bartlett17:38

       ... remarkably. Because I know, 'cause I-

   15. JVJD Vance17:39

       No, absolutely

   16. SBSteven Bartlett17:40

       ... I mess- I meet so many people from so many different sides.

   17. JVJD Vance17:42

       Yeah, of course.

   18. SBSteven Bartlett17:42

       And one of the things that I've come to learn is just, just try and meet everybody as I experience them-

   19. JVJD Vance17:47

       Yes

   20. SBSteven Bartlett17:47

       ... versus like, you know, especially when I'm interviewing politicians, it's, I just want to meet them as I experience them versus thinking about how they've been framed or whatever.

   21. JVJD Vance17:54

       Yeah.

   22. SBSteven Bartlett17:55

       And it's actually made me much more empathetic because, uh, again, obviously, we all have preconceptions.

   23. JVJD Vance17:59

       Sure.

   24. SBSteven Bartlett17:59

       And then you meet someone and you go, "Oh, they are a family person. They care about X, Y, and Z."

   25. JVJD Vance18:03

       Of course.

   26. SBSteven Bartlett18:03

       "They care about the same things. They just disagree about pathways."

   27. JVJD Vance18:06

       Yeah, yeah. Of course.

8. 18:07 – 19:35

   Why Politics Turns Opponents Into Villains

   1. SBSteven Bartlett18:07

      But politics seems to be like, the, the sort of game of politics to me seems to be like paint the other side to be malicious.

   2. JVJD Vance18:15

      Well, I, I think the game of politics, I mean, fundamentally, you're making a pitch to people, right? It's not, it's not about Kamala Harris or Donald Trump or JD Vance or Tim Walz. It's about the American people, right? And fundamentally, to make that sales pitch, you have to say, what's better about this product? What's worse about the other product?

   3. SBSteven Bartlett18:30

      Mm-hmm.

   4. JVJD Vance18:30

      So that, that is just inherent. But again, I, I think you can do that. You know, what I always try to do is I try to talk about, here are the policies that are really bad. Here are the reasons why I think this is screwed up. Here are the reasons why I think that she made mistakes. But I, you know- It is weird. It is fundamentally you are in a position where you're trying to point out the faults in another people, even if it's just their conduct as opposed to their character. But even with that, I, again, I, I, I do think that you see people in politics who fundamentally just really hate the people on the other side.

   5. SBSteven Bartlett19:01

      Yeah.

   6. JVJD Vance19:01

      That's just, just not me. It's never gonna be me. Even when I'm being very pugilist-- Like, even when you, you really have to drive home a point. Like, I, you know, not to get too much into the weeds of, of partisan politics, but, like, something I think the Biden administration just, like, really screwed up in a profoundly dangerous way was the, was our immigration policy, right? Now, there are all re- kinds of reasons why that might have happened, but fundamentally, that was a very, very, very bad screw-up. But I don't hate Kamala Harris because I think she had a bad immigration policy. I just think it's important to point out the flaws.

9. 19:35 – 23:04

   Trump's Immigration Rhetoric Explained

   1. SBSteven Bartlett19:35

      On, on the immigration policy, I mean-

   2. JVJD Vance19:37

      Yeah

   3. SBSteven Bartlett19:37

      ... I've still gotta go through your childhood here, but on this point of immigration, this is another area where you get such division.

   4. JVJD Vance19:41

      Sure.

   5. SBSteven Bartlett19:42

      And you get-- You know, I remember watching the-- There was a couple of things I remember watching when I was, I think I, probably back in Plymouth, um, in the countryside.

   6. JVJD Vance19:48

      [laughs]

   7. SBSteven Bartlett19:49

      One of them was, like, Trump, uh, the, the president demonizing Me- Mexican people and Brown people. I remember this particular quote, which I've always struggled with a little bit, where he said about the Black community, "What have you got to lose?"

   8. JVJD Vance20:01

      [laughs]

   9. SBSteven Bartlett20:02

      And I remember thinking, "I'm a Black man. I feel like I've got things to lose." Um, that kind of narrative about those individuals, that broad strokes sort of demonization of them would make people's lives harder and feels unnecessary. Even if you agree that immigration is a problem, the, the sort of, like, skin color or religion or, like, Mexicans, rapists, and murderers is, is... might, might galvanize in the near term, but in the long term is probably gonna sow division, and that's probably net negative for society.

   10. JVJD Vance20:34

       Well, one, one thing I'd say just about anything that I've ever heard the president say that then s- that's then refracted through the lens of social media or, you know, non-social media, is very often what he is accused of saying, he didn't say it or he said it in a totally different way or there was much greater context. So, like, I re- like, I remember, for example, like, I remember back in twenty sixteen or twenty fifteen, whenever he said this, sort of being, like, offended at the rapists and murderers line.

   11. SBSteven Bartlett21:01

       Yeah.

   12. JVJD Vance21:02

       And then I went and looked at what he said, and what he said, which is actually true, is that some of these countries are actually encouraging prisoners to come into the United States of America. Does that mean that every person comes into America is a rapist or a murderer or is a prisoner? No, it doesn't. But he didn't say that. Right? So, so again, this goes back to the point about being charitable, is I, I do try to understand fundamentally, like, why did a person say that?

   13. SBSteven Bartlett21:25

       Mm-hmm.

   14. JVJD Vance21:26

       What are they actually thinking? What are they trying to get across? And again, if you disagree with me, that's fine.

   15. SBSteven Bartlett21:30

       You wouldn't have said that though, would you?

   16. JVJD Vance21:30

       But I, but, but I think-- Well, the president and I certainly have way different styles. A-absolutely we have different styles, but I mean, the, the way that I talk about immigration, I'd say that's one of the issues where we're, we've always been, like, extremely closely aligned, and that was obviously a major issue during the twenty twenty-four campaign. But the, the way that I think about immigration is, is fundamentally, like, as a country, you are the people who live in your nation, okay? So America's three hundred and thirty million souls, s- you know, I think fun- again, most of them, whe- whether they voted for me or not, they're really good people, and they want really good things for their families. They want really good things for themselves, and yeah, there are, like, some bad apples in every crew. Thir- three hundred and thirty million people, there are definitely some bad people, but most people are fundamentally good and decent. However, you could let people into your country who could be fun, decent, normal human beings who just kind of mess with the, the equation a little bit. It's like if I have a bunch of people over to my house for dinner, and I, I invite ten people to come over for dinner, and one of them brings a stranger, eh, it's probably gonna be fun, right? But if, like, every single one of them bring three strangers, it's gonna totally change the character of the conversation that you're gonna have, of the room that you're gonna have. A country is like that, just on a much more massive scale. So I maybe come at it or I describe it a different way, but fundamentally, I, I think that the president was very right about immigration in a way that was prescient. And even if the blunt way that he described it offended some people, I think it was, like, a very important contribution to not just our country, but to the world.

10. 23:04 – 25:15

    Can You Discuss Immigration Without Division?

    1. SBSteven Bartlett23:04

       I think it would be hard to find an American who didn't think we needed, um-- Again, I'm not an American, so I'm, I guess I'm talking about where I'm from.

    2. JVJD Vance23:11

       Yeah.

    3. SBSteven Bartlett23:11

       But we needed borders and a policy around borders.

    4. JVJD Vance23:13

       Sure.

    5. SBSteven Bartlett23:14

       Just in the same way that we have it around our house and every festival we enjoy and whatever it m- whatever venue we go to.

    6. JVJD Vance23:19

       Exactly.

    7. SBSteven Bartlett23:19

       I think the, um, the thing I've always been concerned about when I see the sort of rising narrative across the world, not just in America, but, uh, now across the West-

    8. JVJD Vance23:25

       Yeah

    9. SBSteven Bartlett23:26

       ... um, the UK as well, is in trying to solve that problem, it seems that, like, division is the most compelling narrative for politicians. And then the, like, downstream consequence of division, you see playing out on the streets. You see, like, especially in the UK at the moment, you're really seeing, um, certain communities be quite, um, demonized and victimized because of this broad political narrative, which, um-

    10. JVJD Vance23:48

        Mm-hmm

    11. SBSteven Bartlett23:48

        ... which is being used to get people into power. But then the downstream consequences of, like, real people on the streets that are Brown or Black or Muslims is, like, I don't think the, the people at the top consider that.

    12. JVJD Vance24:00

        Well, I mean, I-

    13. SBSteven Bartlett24:00

        Is there another way of, of making the point on immigration, legal immigration, without demonizing people?

    14. JVJD Vance24:07

        Well, I, I certainly-- When I, when I talk about it, to the extent that I demonize anybody on the immigration conversation, I demonize the leadership that is immune to thinking about the consequences of this. And so ju- just this, this point about division. Division's a very interesting word to me 'cause I think division's very bad. Like, I, I like living in a, in a community that's cohesive, where people get along, where we love everybody, regardless of what they look like or what they, what, what thoughts they might have in their head. But, like, let me give you, like, a slightly different perspective on the division thing. What if division is not the result of politicians demonizing certain groups, but what if division is the inevitable consequence of when the population changes too quickly, too fast in a given society? And what you see as, as, you know, politicians exploiting division, I actually think that what they're trying to do is articulate a feeling that people have, and sometimes people might express that feeling in ways that we don't like or maybe they're offensive, but, but fundamentally, like, l- l- let's just say you're, you know, you're a working-class guy in Britain or you're a working-class guy in the United States of America, and You know, somebody moves into your

11. 25:15 – 28:36

    Moving Into An All-White Neighborhood

    1. JVJD Vance25:15

       neighborhood, okay?

    2. SBSteven Bartlett25:16

       That's right. I did, I did.

    3. JVJD Vance25:17

       Yeah.

    4. SBSteven Bartlett25:17

       So my, my Black fam- we're, we're... My family's-

    5. JVJD Vance25:19

       Sure

    6. SBSteven Bartlett25:19

       ... obviously Black. My mom's Nigerian-

    7. JVJD Vance25:20

       Okay

    8. SBSteven Bartlett25:20

       ... from Bot- and I came from Botswana, and I moved into-

    9. JVJD Vance25:22

       Yeah, yeah

    10. SBSteven Bartlett25:22

        ... an all-white neighborhood.

    11. JVJD Vance25:23

        Okay. And how, I mean, how did people treat you?

    12. SBSteven Bartlett25:27

        Uh, we were called the N word-

    13. JVJD Vance25:28

        Okay

    14. SBSteven Bartlett25:28

        ... a couple of times, and, you know.

    15. JVJD Vance25:29

        Well, so, okay, so like, like, like I... That's terrible. I don't like that. But I imagine that a lot of people in your community were welcoming unless, unless... Okay.

    16. SBSteven Bartlett25:35

        Yeah. No, they were.

    17. JVJD Vance25:36

        Yeah, yeah.

    18. SBSteven Bartlett25:36

        For sure, for sure.

    19. JVJD Vance25:37

        Okay.

    20. SBSteven Bartlett25:37

        But, you know, as a kid, you only remember the ways you stand out.

    21. JVJD Vance25:39

        No, no, of course.

    22. SBSteven Bartlett25:40

        You know, you-

    23. JVJD Vance25:40

        Of course. Yeah, no, that, that can be like... Yeah.

    24. SBSteven Bartlett25:41

        Yeah.

    25. JVJD Vance25:41

        And I understand that, and I, and I certainly think it's important to, like, try to fight back against that stuff. Like, we don't want young kids who come into a community for that to be, like, their, their memory. But, like, I also... Like, our next door neighbor was Black family. And my, my grandmother was not woke. She did not have progressive views about race or gender or pretty much anything else. But, like, she really loved, I'll never forget this, the, the, the, the Black man who lived next door to us, she said he has a good heart, and that was her highest compliment of anybody.

    26. SBSteven Bartlett26:08

        Mm-hmm.

    27. JVJD Vance26:09

        He was a preacher. The family was, like, a very, very good family, stable family, mom, dad, a few kids. And I was very close to, to, to the young son, and I, I just, I did not experience that... When people talk about division, I just did not see that family as substantially different from us, and I don't think that family... I'm sure they experienced racism.

    28. SBSteven Bartlett26:30

        Mm-hmm.

    29. JVJD Vance26:31

        But I don't think that was, like, a, a common fixture of their day living in that neighborhood.

    30. SBSteven Bartlett26:35

        Yeah.
12. 28:36 – 30:56

    How Political Messaging Creates Division

    1. SBSteven Bartlett28:36

       No, I, I understand the, the spe- the sort of human instinct of, of, uh, I guess, of kind of like xenophobia in a way. Um, and I think we all, we all would want our neighbor to, to be able to connect with our neighbor.

    2. JVJD Vance28:47

       Yeah.

    3. SBSteven Bartlett28:47

       I think it's like the, the point of nuance is when they can't speak my language, what do I then do about that? And I think, you know, m- maybe if my neighbor didn't speak my language, we m- might not get along 'cause we wouldn't be able to connect and talk.

    4. JVJD Vance29:01

       Yeah.

    5. SBSteven Bartlett29:01

       But, but I wouldn't be angry at them. And I, and my, my concern is from a high level when the, the sort of Western narrative now is that it's the Brown people that are the reason that your life is hard, is I... If, if I believed that, if I heard that from my political leaders, it's conceivable that I might be angry at my neighbor even though they've done nothing. Just their presence alone might make me resent them a little bit. And then what happens-

    6. JVJD Vance29:22

       Yeah

    7. SBSteven Bartlett29:22

       ... when I resent them because I'm being told that they're the reason that I'm suffering, they're, they're the reason I don't have a job. And then we get into this, these, like, culture wars, which is a slippery slope.

    8. JVJD Vance29:32

       Yeah.

    9. SBSteven Bartlett29:33

       And I've always wanted-

    10. JVJD Vance29:33

        I, I hear you. But what I would say is, is I'm not mad, and I said this on the campaign trail all the time. I'm not mad at the illegal alien who broke our laws and came into the country, probably... Some of them probably didn't even know they were breaking our laws, who came into our country and wanted better opportunity for their families. What I am mad is the political system-

    11. SBSteven Bartlett29:52

        But you've done the same

    12. JVJD Vance29:52

        ... the, uh, I don't know, right? So it's hard to say. But I am mad at the political system that encourages people to break those rules and sows division and then gets mad at the native population for looking around and saying, "Wait a second. I didn't sign up for this. I didn't agree to this." So I just, like you, I don't know what you describe that. I, I would say there's an instinct in every human being to want to share a community with people where you've got something in common with, okay? And it, and it's like everything, right? A little bit of spice is good. Too much spice changes the, the dynamic a little bit. And I think most people, they're okay with change, but change that happens too fast, too quickly, I think in an immigration context is very, very bad for a country. And I think you guys have had that. We've had that. A lot of European countries have had that. I don't even feel particularly angry, um, at any country because it, it's a mistake that all of us made. But now that you see that div- I mean, you rightly call it division. I just think that we have to say, "Wait a second. Let's try to do things a slightly different way."

    13. SBSteven Bartlett30:50

        I think algorithms also play a big role in that because of the, the design of them.

    14. JVJD Vance30:52

        Oh, 100%. Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

    15. SBSteven Bartlett30:53

        So that's, but that's probably another conversation. Um,

13. 30:56 – 34:07

    Would You Cross A Border For Your Family?

    1. SBSteven Bartlett30:56

       I do think, though, if I, if my family were struggling or at, at all in danger or at risk, and there was a, an area of land over there that offered them a better chance, I personally think for the sake of my family, if my family were struggling, I would try and move my family into that area, and I, I assume you would do the same. I assume you would... If your family... I've got this wonderful photo of your kids and your wife, where if America went to c-catastrophe and Mexico was doing great, would you not try and get into Mexico even if it wasn't Um, you didn't have a visa

    2. JVJD Vance31:27

       I, no, I don't think I would. I mean, I, I, I can understand why some people have to, like, move. You need to eat, you need to provide for your family. But you know what? I, I think that this is another thing about, about the immigration thing that is, that is challenging is, you know, you want people to feel a certain rootedness and a certain devotion to their country. You know, one of the things that's very unique about America compared to Europe is there's this poll question that went around when I was a teenager, maybe when I was in my early 20s, and it asked what percentage of young people in that society would die for their country if they had to. Like, I'm not excited about the idea, but would actually do it. In the United States, it was something like 70%, and in all the other European, all the other Western countries, it was like 20 to 35%. And so, you know, you talk about like, okay, moving to Mexico because there's economic opportunity. In, in a universe where Mexico's flourishing and America's struggling, I get what you're saying, that you want people to move and migrate to the place where they can have a chance of feeding their family. But like I, I love this place in a way that is totally independent of the economic opportunities it provides to my children. There's something much deeper, and there's a connection to, to, to the places, to the memories, to the folkways. I, I mean, I, I drive through Eastern Kentucky, man, and those beautiful rolling hills and even mountains, but they're all mountains that are alight with life because they're, you know, it's not the Rockies. You know, you go, you go to, you go to West Virginia. You should do this. It's the, the most beautiful area, I think, in the world because you get the mountains, and you get the rivers, and you get that, but it's also so green and rich with life. I feel an attachment to it that is very, very unique.

    3. SBSteven Bartlett33:08

       But even if, if your family were at risk, you wouldn't move them into Mexico?

    4. JVJD Vance33:12

       Well, I mean, look, my, my, the story of my family, my grandparents, is they came from Eastern Kentucky and moved to Southern Ohio, not exactly that far away. These are, these are two very close areas. But they moved away even though they didn't want to because of economic opportunity to provide for their families. So I, I certainly empathize with that. I mean, yeah, if somebody showed up, I mean, like I'm the vice president, I have a Secret Service detail, it's hard to put myself in this perspective right now. But if like somebody showed up to my home in Cincinnati and pointed a gun at my head and said, "You have to leave or we're gonna kill your children," I'd leave, right? But-

    5. SBSteven Bartlett33:42

       Yeah

    6. JVJD Vance33:42

       ... I, I think most migration decisions are not actually that-

    7. SBSteven Bartlett33:46

       Extreme

    8. JVJD Vance33:46

       ... consequential and extreme.

    9. SBSteven Bartlett33:48

       Makes sense.

    10. JVJD Vance33:48

        Yeah.

    11. SBSteven Bartlett33:49

        There should be a button just down below here, and if it says Subscribed, you're already subscribed. If it says Subscriber, that means you're not yet. And if you're not subscribed, please could you do us a favor and hit that button. It helps the show more than you know, and according to the algorithm, you're someone that watches our show, but you haven't yet hit that button. Thank you so much.

14. 34:07 – 37:06

    Why You Joined The Marine Corps

    1. SBSteven Bartlett34:07

       This young man here. You ultimately go into the Marine Corps?

    2. JVJD Vance34:10

       I go into the Marine Corps. Yeah, so this is, this is me in, I believe, right after boot camp, so in 2003 maybe. May- yeah, I think 2003. This is me. This photo is taken in boot camp, and this is, I'm pretty sure this is taken in Iraq actually. This is either in 05 or 06 at a point when, you know, the Iraq War was not going well. But the good guy in the photo-

    3. SBSteven Bartlett34:31

       Why, why did you go to the Marine Corps? What was the decision?

    4. JVJD Vance34:34

       You know, there was this sense, and in hindsight I really resent this. I mean, I, I'm genuinely still angry at George W. Bush over this, even though, again, I, I try to, I try to be charitable, and I have friends who worked for him, think he's a great guy. I'm not saying he's not. But when I was a senior in high school, I remember I'm at a restaurant, it's called Skyline Chili in southwestern Ohio, and this guy comes out of Skyline Chili. He's got like a World War II red veterans hat. We call them Red Hatters in the United States.

    5. SBSteven Bartlett35:07

       Mm-hmm.

    6. JVJD Vance35:07

       So he was a veteran of World War II. And I remember feeling like, 'cause you know, even at that stage, this is probably 2003, 2002 maybe, I remember thinking to myself, "This generation is dying away." Like I, I had this feeling, right? Because most, most veterans you met, they were veterans of Vietnam, maybe of the first Iraq War. But I just went up and I was like, I shook his hand and I said, "Thank you, sir, for your service." And you know, he was like genuinely touched, but I remember thinking, "This guy answered the call. Now we have to answer the call." You know, September the 11th happened when I was a junior in high school, and there was this patriotic sense of this is our World War II, right? And even some of the historical analogies that got used were the exact same. Saddam Hussein was Adolf Hitler. What if you had had an opportunity to stand up and say no to Adolf Hitler when he annexed the Sudetenland? Wouldn't you have taken that chance? And it, it's like i- they, they, they were so good at tapping into that patriotic reservoir. And by the way, I think that reservoir is a very valuable thing. I think it's important for statesmen to cultivate it, but only to tap into it when it's really necessary-

    7. SBSteven Bartlett36:12

       Mm-hmm

    8. JVJD Vance36:12

       ... and when it's really justified. And what was so screwed up about Iraq is, I mean, I remember like I went to the Marine Corps recruiter, and I wanted to be a Marine because my older cousins were Marines, and people said the Marines were the toughest. Whether that's true or not, that was certainly the impression that Marines had of themselves. I signed on the dotted line. I went in what's called open contract. So sometimes you sign up and you have your job assigned, like you already know what you're gonna do. I wanted, I wanted open contract. I said, "You can give me whatever job you want to. I just want to be a Marine." And I, I, I did that because I love my country, and I wanted to contribute in the same way that that guy who wore a red hat was still wearing his red hat, was still proud of it, knew that he contributed. And, uh, you know, that led me, of course, to go to Iraq from '05 to '06 and made a lot of friends, gained a, a ton of appreciation for the Marine Corps as an institution and the people, but you know, became a little jaded about our political leadership.

    9. SBSteven Bartlett37:05

       Why

15. 37:06 – 39:38

    Why George W. Bush Frustrated You

    1. SBSteven Bartlett37:06

       are you-- You said you, you were kind of annoyed at Bush.

    2. JVJD Vance37:09

       Because that patriotic reservoir that exists in any country, I think it's maybe most powerful in the United States of America because, again, we have this 70, 70-plus percent of young people say they would die for their country. That's very unique among advanced economies. And I'm sure a lot of people in Europe look at that and say, "Oh, those jingoistic idiots, they're, you know, they're, they're wrong," or, "There's something bad about that." But I actually think you h- to have a real nation, you have to have the willingness that if, God forbid, something happens, you're willing to put on your uniform and go and do what needs to be done. But again, i- in order for that to work In order for that feeling to be justified, leaders have to not take advantage of it. You can't say Saddam Hussein is Adolf Hitler. He wasn't.

    3. SBSteven Bartlett37:54

       Mm-hmm.

    4. JVJD Vance37:54

       You, you gotta be careful with it, and I don't think that George W. Bush was careful with it. I, I think that he called the nation to do something that ultimately wasn't actually in our best interest as a nation, but more fundamentally, he drew on that wellspring of patriotism to direct us to do something that we shouldn't have been doing in the first place.

    5. SBSteven Bartlett38:14

       Because he had bad information, or because of negligence or incompetence?

    6. JVJD Vance38:18

       I don't, I mean, I, you know, I know enough people who know him. I think he had bad information, but, you know, fundamentally, like, [smacks lips] post 9/11 was really important. We had to go and deal with the terrorist networks that had existed all across the world, that had been allowed to fester over the previous generation of, of American negligence. But fundamentally, the war on terrorism was not an existential thing to the United States of America, in the sa- in the way that, like, World War II was an existential thing for Britain, right? And I, I think we just, we have to be careful about how we describe what we're asking our young people to do, because if you ask them to do something and they feel like you were being honest with them, I think that sort of pays dividends into that patr- patriotic reservoir.

    7. SBSteven Bartlett39:04

       Mm-hmm.

    8. JVJD Vance39:04

       If you ask somebody to do something and it turns out you were lying to them, whether it was intentional or not, I think you draw down that patriotic reservoir. I don't know what the... By the way, I mentioned that, that poll and, you know, I don't have the information, I don't have the data in front of me, but whatever the number of Americans, young Americans who say they would die for their country, I would bet my... I'd, I'd bet a lot of money that that number in 2026 is much lower than it was in 2003.

    9. SBSteven Bartlett39:30

       So it's really like a sort of a, a contract with the nation of-

    10. JVJD Vance39:32

        Exactly

    11. SBSteven Bartlett39:33

        ... that's built on trust.

    12. JVJD Vance39:33

        It's a social contract built on trust. You violate that trust, it has very, very bad consequences.

16. 39:38 – 41:42

    Ads

    1. JVJD Vance39:38

       [paper rustles]

    2. SBSteven Bartlett39:38

       If you're gonna take tips from anyone on how to stay focused and high energy, let it be from the greatest pound for pound fighter of all time, the guy they call Jonny "Bones" Jones. Jon is a co-owner of our show sponsor, Ketone IQ, alongside myself, and when you hear why, it probably makes a lot of sense to you. When he's training or fighting, he needs high quality, steady laser-like focus without the crash, and ketones give him exactly that. And unlike caffeine, ketones don't stimulate your brain, they fuel it. So your brain actually loves ketones because it runs on them much more efficiently than anything else. And right now, Ketone IQ is giving away one of a kind pair signed MMA gloves from Jon Jones himself and the upcoming gold medal wrestler he's coaching called Gable Stevenson. They are very, very rare, and if you want your shot at winning them, go to ketone.com/steven to enter to win. No purchase necessary, terms and conditions apply, and you'll also get 30% off your first subscription order, exclusive Ketone IQ merch, and of course, your shot at these signed gloves. [paper rustles] [foreign language] I don't speak Vietnamese, but this show can because of AI video technology from our sponsor, HeyGen. I get messages every single week from those of you listening to The Diary Of A CEO all around the world, and you express how much impact it's had on you and your life. And if that's true, then those conversations shouldn't only reach people in English. HeyGen can take one recording of me and deliver it in any language while keeping my voice, timing, and expressions intact. But you don't need a studio like this to make it work for you. Record 15 seconds of yourself and get an AI avatar that delivers studio quality video in over 175 languages. We're up to 20 languages now, and we're not the only ones using it. HeyGen is already used by 30 million people, including 85% of the Fortune 100. Whether you're building an audience on social media, launching an online course, or rolling out training across your team, check out HeyGen now. Your first three videos are totally free at heygen.com/doac. That's H-E-Y-G-E-N.com/doac. See you there. [paper rustles]

17. 41:42 – 48:54

    The War With Iran

    1. SBSteven Bartlett41:42

       The, the US is, I guess, at, in a war now.

    2. JVJD Vance41:45

       Well, not anymore. [laughs]

    3. SBSteven Bartlett41:49

       Well, famous last words. [laughs]

    4. JVJD Vance41:51

       Fair.

    5. SBSteven Bartlett41:51

       'Cause we-

    6. JVJD Vance41:52

       We are in a ceasefire that I feel very good about-

    7. SBSteven Bartlett41:54

       Okay

    8. JVJD Vance41:54

       ... that we announced. I know this will air later, but-

    9. SBSteven Bartlett41:56

       Yeah

    10. JVJD Vance41:56

        ... but we announced the ceasefire. Uh, we, we announced the, the peace agreement with the Iranians yesterday.

    11. SBSteven Bartlett42:01

        Yes. I've learnt so much about war because of this war, um, in part because I'm an interviewer at the time of war.

    12. JVJD Vance42:07

        Sure.

    13. SBSteven Bartlett42:08

        And so I've been having lots of conversations with lots of people about the nature of war, and I've learnt so much. Frankly, I didn't know anything about Vietnam and really the psychology of war-

    14. JVJD Vance42:15

        Yeah

    15. SBSteven Bartlett42:15

        ... and how, like, when you start a war, uh, Robert Pape said this to me, he said, "The thing people underestimate about war is when the bombs start dropping, politics changes both where the bombs are dropping and at home."

    16. JVJD Vance42:26

        Sure.

    17. SBSteven Bartlett42:27

        And I, I to some degree think that with the Iran war now, that's like exactly what happened.

    18. JVJD Vance42:32

        Mm.

    19. SBSteven Bartlett42:32

        It, from my assessment of it, which is it looked like it was gonna be quite straightforward. Drop the bombs, take out the leader. Um, the people rise up, which is what, um, pr- the president had said. He'd encouraged the people to rise up when those bombs dropped and Khomeini was taken out. But then what then happened, what is, again, I don't know any what I'm talking about here, so please correct me, is it looked like the country kind of fractured into all of these sort of little pockets of m- militia and military. Um, I remember, I think it was Hegseth saying, "It just takes some time for the carrier pigeon to get out to where the soldiers are-

    20. JVJD Vance43:03

        Yeah

    21. SBSteven Bartlett43:03

        ... at the outpost." But, and this speaks to-

    22. JVJD Vance43:04

        That's right

    23. SBSteven Bartlett43:04

        ... how the fracturing had happened.

    24. JVJD Vance43:06

        Yeah.

    25. SBSteven Bartlett43:06

        And then I heard, uh, the president, and I think yourself multiple s- times say, like, "We don't really know who we're negotiating with," or words to that effect, because we've taken out the first and second row of leadership. And then I, I thought we, gosh, we're in the same situation again, where the bombs started dropping, unintended consequences where there's now not one central leadership to negotiate with. But also politics at home has shifted. The, the, I mean, the approval ratings of, I got this graph of the approval ratings, had started to plummet at home.

    26. JVJD Vance43:38

        Mm.

    27. SBSteven Bartlett43:39

        And politics is changing on the ground there as well. Is this another forever war?

    28. JVJD Vance43:44

        Well, the answer is no. Um, and you know, this is always, when I, I talked about this, this conflict, I always said Donald Trump learned the lessons. It's actually, that, that's almost unfair to him. He didn't learn the lessons of the Iraq War because back during the Iraq War he was saying, "This was stupid. We should get out of Iraq." He was saying that back then. And I think that while there were certainly some objectives that we had in this conflict, I just never had any doubt. Now obviously I'm an insider. I saw the president's deliberations and thought on this, but I, I never had any worry that this would become a multi-year expedition with no end in sight because I knew that we had leadership that was trying to define the objective very narrowly, accomplish the objective, and then see where we are.

    29. SBSteven Bartlett44:30

        Mm-hmm.

    30. JVJD Vance44:31

        And so, you know, if you go back, you talk about this, this street uprising, certainly there was some thought that it would be possible that the Iranian street would rise up in the face of this thing and that you would see, you know, a new government that was much more pro-American, much more pro-Western. What, what happened though is, and what we knew we could do, is degrade their military. That was the, that was actually the primary objective. Yes, the president talked about the Iranians rising up, but the primary objective was always to degrade their conventional power so that we could be in a better position vis-à-vis Iran, so that whoever was calling the shots, they didn't have a loaded gun to our head anymore, okay? And that's what we knew we could accomplish. And then there was always the question about, okay, now that we've accomplished that, where do we go from here? And you know, one, one of the things that I, I feel just, just quite good about this moment that we're in is the president basically bought us an option. He said, "We can weaken their military, destroy their conventional military, we can change their leadership, and then we can actually present a pathway to the Iranian leadership. Where do we go from here?" Like you said something very interesting that was true two months ago that's not true now. Two months ago I would've said I had no idea who we're, who we're negotiating with, absolutely.
18. 48:54 – 51:43

    Iran's Most Powerful Weapon

    1. JVJD Vance48:54

       pretty good about it.

    2. SBSteven Bartlett48:54

       The other term I'd never heard before is Strait of Hormuz.

    3. JVJD Vance48:57

       Yes. Yeah.

    4. SBSteven Bartlett48:57

       I've heard so much about the bloody Strait of Hormuz.

    5. JVJD Vance48:59

       [laughs]

    6. SBSteven Bartlett49:00

       Um, did you have any idea that the Iranians would cut off the Strait of Hormuz?

    7. JVJD Vance49:04

       Yes.

    8. SBSteven Bartlett49:04

       You, you, you did know that going into it? So in-

    9. JVJD Vance49:06

       It was a major m- yeah, yeah. It was, as soon as you see these media reports like the, the Trump team was caught off guard. What would happen in the Strait of Hormuz was a main fixture of the conversation that we were having about whether to do this, how to do this, so it was certainly a variable. Now, now you can never predict with 100% certainty what people are going to do, but the basic bias that we had going into it is that they would try to cut off the strait, they would try to jack up energy prices. They thought, and I think this is true, they thought that they could cut off the straits for us but actually keep the straits open for themselves. That ended up not being true when we imposed the blockade. But fundamentally we, we knew some version of what would happen, but we also went into it saying, "If they do this, fundamentally it's a short-term thing." So like Brent crude is sort of the main crude oil index, right? I think the highest it got was $126 per barrel. Right now, sitting here, it's around $82 a barrel. It's fallen off a cliff because there's a broad recognition that, yeah, it was a short-term shock, but not a short-term shock that's gonna permanently alter the world energy economy.

    10. SBSteven Bartlett50:17

        It's quite a powerful weapon they have in their arsenal just to take, shutter the world's economy and piss off your people at home at the gas pump. It's quite like, it's quite a [laughs]

    11. JVJD Vance50:27

        Well, uh, geography really matters in warfare, it turns out. And yes, they have great proximity to the Strait of Hormuz. But, but again, i- if you just go back two weeks ago, one of the things that's interesting, uh, really underreported, um, but I, I think, you know, your listeners will obviously be interested in, is if you look at the amount of oil that we were getting out of the Strait of Hormuz, we, I mean the United States, the Gulf Coast Coalition, broadly speaking, the Arabs in the Gulf, right? You look at it, what it was, call it April 1st, it was like close to zero. You go to May 30th, early June, it was many, many million barrels of, of oil a day. Now, not enough to eliminate the shock, to be clear, but we were seeing significant increases in oil traffic. And again, I think that's one of the reasons why we're having a good negotiation with the Iranians, is they recognized, yes, they have this leverage point, but maybe not forever. And it's one of those cards you can play, but you can't necessarily play it week after week after week. It degrades in power. So I take your point, yeah, they have this geographical thing going on, but I think that geographical leverage point was weakening over time, and it's, it's why we are where we are with, I think, with a very good deal.

    12. SBSteven Bartlett51:41

        'Cause with-

    13. JVJD Vance51:41

        Knock on wood. We have to see it to

19. 51:43 – 52:38

    Could Iran Wait Out Trump?

    1. JVJD Vance51:43

       completion.

    2. SBSteven Bartlett51:44

       Yeah, no, yeah. Because if you're them, you go, "Well, all I've got to do is wait two years."

    3. JVJD Vance51:47

       Yeah.

    4. SBSteven Bartlett51:47

       'Cause the president is gonna be, you know, removed from, from office in two years' time. It's gonna be at the end of his term. So if they could just wait it out for two years, they can hope that a new political leader that comes in, um, might be more charitable with them.

    5. JVJD Vance52:01

       Yeah, but if, if, if Donald Trump has two and a half years left in office, I think the Iranians recognize they did not have two and a half years to wait things out. One is mo- as we got more and more oil out of the Strait, their leverage point decreased, but in some ways more importantly, like look, you look at Persian culture, you look at the history of Iran, this is one of the proudest and oldest civilizations anywhere in the world. They don't wanna be like a Libya-style rump state.

    6. SBSteven Bartlett52:25

       Mm-hmm.

    7. JVJD Vance52:26

       They want to have a much brighter future. Like, I think that that's actually true. Now, there's a question about how to get there, and obviously there's a lot of animosity between the two sides, but I do think something has fundamentally changed in the way that

20. 52:38 – 53:46

    The Real Deal With Iran

    1. JVJD Vance52:38

       regime sees the world.

    2. SBSteven Bartlett52:39

       The, um, the deal that you have on the table-

    3. JVJD Vance52:42

       Yes

    4. SBSteven Bartlett52:42

       ... now, okay, excuse me if I'm skeptical. [laughs] But I said to you before we start, started recording, I watch everything.

    5. JVJD Vance52:48

       Yes.

    6. SBSteven Bartlett52:49

       So I've watched every... If, if you do an interview, Hegseth does one, if the president does one, I see it.

    7. JVJD Vance52:54

       Yep.

    8. SBSteven Bartlett52:54

       I see the whole thing.

    9. JVJD Vance52:55

       Okay.

    10. SBSteven Bartlett52:55

        I don't know why, [laughs] but I, that I, I'm very, very interested in US politics because it does impact the whole world.

    11. JVJD Vance53:01

        Sure.

    12. SBSteven Bartlett53:02

        And as I've watched these interviews, there's been lots of false deals. You flew out there to Pakistan, and you flew right back.

    13. JVJD Vance53:08

        Yeah.

    14. SBSteven Bartlett53:08

        The deal wasn't done. Um, I think I saw a report the other day that said, uh, the president has said roughly 30 times that there's a deal done or that there's a deal on the table, usually on a Sunday, then it's not, then we go back into this negotiation thing. So I'm like, "I don't have any trust anymore-

    15. JVJD Vance53:22

        Okay

    16. SBSteven Bartlett53:22

        ... for, for the, for a deal getting done."

    17. JVJD Vance53:23

        Well, this one's real, so.

    18. SBSteven Bartlett53:24

        Okay, good. Okay. So interesting.

    19. JVJD Vance53:26

        People can always change their minds, but this one is real.

    20. SBSteven Bartlett53:28

        For sure. So what, what does that mean? Does it mean that there's a contract that has been sent with terms on it, and they've provisionally, like a term sheet, said, "We agree"?

    21. JVJD Vance53:36

        Yes.

    22. SBSteven Bartlett53:36

        Okay.

    23. JVJD Vance53:37

        That's exactly what's happened.

    24. SBSteven Bartlett53:38

        Okay. So they, they've agreed to a term sheet.

    25. JVJD Vance53:39

        Yes.

    26. SBSteven Bartlett53:40

        And then as is the case in business and investing, that becomes more of a formalized contract.

    27. JVJD Vance53:44

        Correct.

    28. SBSteven Bartlett53:44

        And then that's signed.

    29. JVJD Vance53:45

        That's

21. 53:46 – 56:19

    What's Inside The Iran Term Sheet?

    1. JVJD Vance53:46

       right.

    2. SBSteven Bartlett53:46

       So what is in the term sheet?

    3. JVJD Vance53:48

       Well, a few things. So the, the first is that the Straits of Hormuz opens effectively immediately, and the blockade is lifted effectively immediately. Now, when I say effectively, that's doing a little bit of work there because, you know, p- part of what's going on is there's a different risk tolerance for different shippers in the Gulf. So some, again, like I said earlier, some of these guys are already shipping a lot of oil through the Straits of Hormuz right now, even though the Iranians are threatening to shoot at them. But what, what this means is that over time, we're gonna demine the Strait of Hormuz, the Iranians are gonna stop shooting, we're gonna lift our naval blockade, and you're gonna see, I think, a pretty quick resumption of full flow of traffic in the Strait of Hormuz. That, that's number one-

    4. SBSteven Bartlett54:29

       And there's mines in there

    5. JVJD Vance54:29

       ... the most important thing.

    6. SBSteven Bartlett54:30

       There's mines in there.

    7. JVJD Vance54:30

       Yeah, there, there are mines in there. But it, it's, you know, it's a very big waterway. There's a lot of traffic moving right now, so we know where the mines are. They're not everywhere. And you know, again, the ships are able to move. The biggest obstacle and impediment to ships moving right now is actually not the mines themselves, it's the Iranians who are shooting drones and missiles on the other side. Now, I say that, we have seen a precipitous decline since we signed this agreement. We've seen a precipitous decline in even that happening. So you're already, again, seeing the fruits of this negotiation that we have. Number two is it contemplates the Iranians giving up their highly enriched stockpile of material, committing to a long-term inspections regime on their nuclear program, and in exchange, having a totally different economic relationship with the United States of America. So like there's a stack of, of sanctions that the US has on Iran that is like 60 pages long. That is incredibly destructive to the Iranian economy by design, right? The, the, the deal is you're not gonna behave like a normal country. We're not going to engage in normal trade and transactions with you. What this agreement provides is that if the Iranians take significant steps to behave like a normal country, they're gonna get significant reintegration into the world economy.

    8. SBSteven Bartlett55:46

       Okay.

    9. JVJD Vance55:46

       And I think that's, that, that, that is in, in some ways the most profound thing, and what the United States gets out of that is, is the long-term guarantee that they never become a nuclear power. I think people always sort of... I- it's hard to, to appreciate how temporal this is. The Iranian nuclear program has been completely destroyed. Like, it doesn't exist right now, but over time you can try to rebuild it. And so what we're trying to say is, "We don't want you to rebuild this program. If you make real commitments and verifiable commitments that you're not going to, then you're getting a lot of economic benefits

22. 56:19 – 57:06

    What Happens To Iran's Nuclear Material?

    1. JVJD Vance56:19

       on the side."

    2. SBSteven Bartlett56:20

       You drop those big, uh, bunker bos- buster bombs.

    3. JVJD Vance56:22

       Correct.

    4. SBSteven Bartlett56:23

       Um, it's very fascinating about all the, all of, that whole-

    5. JVJD Vance56:26

       Yeah

    6. SBSteven Bartlett56:26

       ... ser- series of, of military operations and, um, it, the nuclear material is now buried pretty deep underground-

    7. JVJD Vance56:32

       Correct

    8. SBSteven Bartlett56:32

       ... from what I understand. With this deal, do you get to go and get it? Do they hand it over to you? What happens?

    9. JVJD Vance56:37

       So the way the deal is stru- is structured is that the Iranians, the Americans, and the International Atomic Energy Agency will actually work together to go get the material and destroy it.

    10. SBSteven Bartlett56:47

        Okay.

    11. JVJD Vance56:47

        That's, that's the basic idea-

    12. SBSteven Bartlett56:49

        Okay

    13. JVJD Vance56:49

        ... is that we're all gonna work together. Again, the, the agreement contemplates a new era in relationsh- so the idea is that we're all gonna try to work together, destroy this material. And again, if that happens, the Iranians are gonna have a totally different economic relationship with the West, and if it doesn't happen, then the United States is

23. 57:06 – 58:11

    Can Inspectors Stop Secret Nuclear Programs?

    1. JVJD Vance57:06

       no worse off.

    2. SBSteven Bartlett57:06

       And you, do you get to check that they're not just going to a different mountain and building new nuclear weapons somewhere?

    3. JVJD Vance57:11

       That's where the verification element comes in, but we have a very good sense, you know, you can probably guess why. We have a very good sense of what's going on in the country of Iran. We could probably keep that material just permanently buried, but we don't wanna do that. We actually wanna solve the problem, and we want the Iranians to have a different relationship with us, and that's what we're trying to do.

    4. SBSteven Bartlett57:27

       And the specifics of you being able to go and check that they're not just building new nuclear weapons, uh, it sounds to me like the specifics haven't been defined yet, like how those checks take place.

    5. JVJD Vance57:36

       Well, it's, yeah, it's, it's, like you said, it's, it's a term sheet where we've got broad agreement on principles-

    6. SBSteven Bartlett57:42

       Mm-hmm

    7. JVJD Vance57:42

       ... and how we're gonna approach the negotiation, but there are a lot of details that we gotta figure out from here.

    8. SBSteven Bartlett57:47

       So I've got straight up for news opens, n- um, nuclear inspections, but also a coalition to remove the nuclear waste.

    9. JVJD Vance57:53

       Correct.

    10. SBSteven Bartlett57:53

        Um, from that they get the opportunity to participate in the, in the economy and sanctions will be lifted.

    11. JVJD Vance57:57

        Yep. That's right.

    12. SBSteven Bartlett57:58

        Is there anything that's in that term sheet that's not included there?

    13. JVJD Vance58:02

        I mean, there are other, like, little details and things like that. There's, you know, obviously the permanent cessation of hostilities. We're trying to bring in a, a regional era of peace here, but that's pretty much the main

24. 58:11 – 59:18

    Trump's Message To Netanyahu

    1. JVJD Vance58:11

       thing.

    2. SBSteven Bartlett58:11

       And Israel, um, there was some-

    3. JVJD Vance58:13

       Yeah

    4. SBSteven Bartlett58:13

       ... uh, some interesting words exchanged [laughs] yesterday.

    5. JVJD Vance58:16

       [laughs]

    6. SBSteven Bartlett58:17

       Again, I watch everything, so I saw that, the, the Fox reporter had called Trump, I think yesterday-

    7. JVJD Vance58:21

       [laughs]

    8. SBSteven Bartlett58:21

       ... because Netanyahu had started fi- firing some bombs, and he had some select words, kinda like your grandmother's words. [laughs]

    9. JVJD Vance58:29

       Yes, indeed.

    10. SBSteven Bartlett58:30

        Apparently he said, uh, Trump said he'd phoned Netanyahu and told him he had, "No fucking judgment. Why did Bibi have to do a fucking attack?"

    11. JVJD Vance58:37

        [laughs]

    12. SBSteven Bartlett58:37

        "I'm so pissed off." An hour before he was supposed to sign the deal, Trump called Netanyahu, "A very difficult guy. He should be very thankful for us for doing this, because if Iran had a nuclear weapon, Israel wouldn't be around for two hours." Um, lots of cussing at Netanyahu-

    13. JVJD Vance58:52

        [laughs]

    14. SBSteven Bartlett58:52

        ... and what he had done. You, I've heard you actually say that you think Israel and the United States have two different objectives as it relates to, I don't wanna mischaracterize your words, but-

    15. JVJD Vance59:00

        Well, what I'd say is that we're different countries with different interests.

    16. SBSteven Bartlett59:03

        Yeah.

    17. JVJD Vance59:03

        I think in the United States sometimes people characterize, you know, Israel is a, is a good partner to the United States. That is true. But sometimes people mischaracterize it and say that Israel and the United States are fundamentally always aligned. It's just not true. We're different countries. We have different needs. We have different geographies.

25. 59:18 – 1:00:13

    Do You Trust Israel?

    1. SBSteven Bartlett59:18

       Do you trust them?

    2. JVJD Vance59:19

       You know, I don't trust anybody, um-

    3. SBSteven Bartlett59:21

       [laughs]

    4. JVJD Vance59:22

       ... when, when it comes to international affairs and diplomacy. Do I think that they're, they're very capable? Absolutely. Do I think that, again, when we have shared interests, we work together very well? Absolutely. But, but do I... But I, I don't trust anyone, and I, I think that we, we just have to continually be laser focused on what our interests are. And, and you know what the president said about Bibi is, you know, sometimes, you know, we, we are the world's superpower, and obviously we're Israel's most important ally anywhere in the world. And sometimes to ensure that we are able to accomplish our objectives, the president has to have a very frank conversation with the prime minister of Israel. Sometimes he does that. Sometimes everything works smoothly. Sometimes it doesn't.

    5. SBSteven Bartlett1:00:02

       What-

    6. JVJD Vance1:00:02

       It's just the nature, like any relationship, right? Any relationship is gonna have moments where you have to be more direct. Sometimes you're working together, and sometimes there's a little

26. 1:00:13 – 1:02:45

    Why The US And Israel Are So Closely Linked

    1. JVJD Vance1:00:13

       bit more conflict.

    2. SBSteven Bartlett1:00:13

       The world's e- opinion and thoughts about the US-Israel relationship-

    3. JVJD Vance1:00:18

       Yeah

    4. SBSteven Bartlett1:00:19

       ... has never been more widely discussed.

    5. JVJD Vance1:00:21

       I agree.

    6. SBSteven Bartlett1:00:22

       And, and I d- I almost, I almost don't know why, but it's, it seems to be the case that over the last, I'd say six to 12 months, people are really now questioning what is this relationship and who is, who is the dominant part- partner in the relationship? What, f- for someone, and just in super simple terms, 'cause I don't really know a lot about this particular point-

    7. JVJD Vance1:00:37

       Sure

    8. SBSteven Bartlett1:00:37

       ... what is the relationship and why, and where did it come from?

    9. JVJD Vance1:00:42

       Well, you know, I'm, I'm hardly an expert in US-Israeli relations, right? But, but let, let me just say they're obviously, in some ways, the only democracy in the Middle East, okay? Uh, very advanced economy, very high skilled people, technological ingenuity. I mean, it's a country of 9 million people. They generate a lot of the world's inventions just from 9 million people. It's a very impressive country economically. They're also probably better at intelligence collection than any country in the world. So they're, again... And, and again, because they're an advanced economy, because, you know, their people, generally speaking, wanna live in peace and harmony, just wanna go to work and raise their kids, there are a lot of shared interests and a lot of shared objectives. And I think that, you know, over time, especially, for example, when one of our biggest problems going back to, you know, the early 2000s was the rise of Islamic terrorism, um, Islamic radical terrorism, I should say. There was a sort of broad recognition that there's a lot for us to work on. But, but again, even, even if you go back to then, the early 2000s, very large alignment between Israeli interests and American interests. But even in, like, the early 2000s, the Israelis were much more worried about Iran than the United States was, right? We were much more worried about Al- Al-Qaeda, like a different branch of Islamic terrorism. So even when we've been very aligned, we're just different countries that have different objectives. And you know, I will say, having seen the president of the United States operate, I feel quite confident that, you know- They are the junior partner, we're the senior partner, we're the world superpower. That's the way that it works. But, you know, again, sometimes it's, it's like with the UK. I would say the UK is our closest ally, our oldest ally. I'm not just saying that 'cause you're a Brit.

    10. SBSteven Bartlett1:02:16

        Do you trust the UK?

    11. JVJD Vance1:02:17

        Uh, again, I don't really trust anybody. But do I like, do I like a lot of Brits? Absolutely. Do I have a gr- I mean, incredible fondness for the United Kingdom as a country and a culture? Absolutely. And I really like a lot of the people, even the labor government, even though they're politically misaligned, uh, with, with me and, and the rest of the Trump administration. But, you know, like, we have disagreements from time to time. So we work really well together, and sometimes we have misaligned interests, and we have to pursue our interests in the best way we

27. 1:02:45 – 1:03:51

    What Does Netanyahu Really Want?

    1. JVJD Vance1:02:45

       can.

    2. SBSteven Bartlett1:02:45

       What does... And please do tell me, like, what does Netanyahu want? Because I sit here with these experts-

    3. JVJD Vance1:02:51

       Yeah

    4. SBSteven Bartlett1:02:51

       ... and they say they want to overtake the whole of the Middle East. They want to run the Middle East. What does he want?

    5. JVJD Vance1:02:55

       I don't know. I don't know. Um-

    6. SBSteven Bartlett1:02:57

       [laughs] You don't know.

    7. JVJD Vance1:02:58

       I... Well, I mean, I, I, I don't, I can't get in- inside somebody's head.

    8. SBSteven Bartlett1:03:01

       Have you asked them what they want? What do you think they want?

    9. JVJD Vance1:03:04

       Well, I, I think that in this particular operation, again, where interests were aligned is we wanted Iranian conventional military power to be much weaker, to be decimated. You know, the, the Israelis shared that objective. Do I think that there are maybe, I don't know if Bibi thinks this, but do I think there are people within Israeli society who would like to turn Iran into Libya, basically a failed state with ninety million people? Probably, but I, I don't know that Bibi wants that. I've actually never had that conversation with him. It would be an interesting conversation to have. I'll tell you right now, is Iran turning into a Persian Libya good for the United States of America? Absolutely not. And that's one of the reasons why the president has set us on this course of working on our interests, which is the elimination of the nuclear threat and a, and a changed dynamic with the Iranians, which is very much on the

28. 1:03:51 – 1:07:20

    Why Your Views On Trump Changed

    1. JVJD Vance1:03:51

       table.

    2. SBSteven Bartlett1:03:51

       You run for Senate-

    3. JVJD Vance1:03:53

       Yeah

    4. SBSteven Bartlett1:03:53

       ... um, and you're successful, and this is really from what I can see from my research, where you and Trump first, uh, made friends, I should say.

    5. JVJD Vance1:04:01

       Yeah.

    6. SBSteven Bartlett1:04:01

       Uh, before then you weren't friends.

    7. JVJD Vance1:04:02

       No, that's right.

    8. SBSteven Bartlett1:04:03

       You were quite critical of Donald Trump before then. I mean, you've been probably asked this a million times, but when-

    9. JVJD Vance1:04:08

       [laughs]

    10. SBSteven Bartlett1:04:08

        I actually didn't know this until literally today.

    11. JVJD Vance1:04:10

        Okay.

    12. SBSteven Bartlett1:04:10

        That y- I read the piece you'd written in The Atlantic where you criticized him-

    13. JVJD Vance1:04:13

        Yeah

    14. SBSteven Bartlett1:04:13

        ... for taking advantage of the struggling w- working class. "What Trump offers," this is your quote, "is an easy escape from pain. To every complex problem, he promises a simple solution. He can bring jobs back simply by punishing offshore companies into submission, as he told a New Hampshire crowd. Folks are too similar with the opioid Scrooge. He can cure the addiction epidemic by building a Mexican wall and keeping the cartels out. He will spare the United States from humiliation and military defeat with indiscriminate bombing. It doesn't matter that no credible military leader has endorsed his plan. He never offers detail for those plans to work. Because Trump's, Trump is cultural her- her- heroin. He makes some f- people feel better, but he cannot fix all the ails, all that ails them, and one day they'll realize it." Very tough words-

    15. JVJD Vance1:04:57

        Mm-hmm

    16. SBSteven Bartlett1:04:57

        ... against Trump.

    17. JVJD Vance1:04:58

        Long time ago, but-

    18. SBSteven Bartlett1:04:59

        2016.

    19. JVJD Vance1:04:59

        Yeah.

    20. SBSteven Bartlett1:05:00

        And 10 years ago. What changed?

    21. JVJD Vance1:05:02

        Well, let me, let me pick up. First of all, I think you always have to be able to acknowledge when you're right and when you're wrong. And I think there was ri- a lot I was right about in 2016, but, but just to pick up on something, r- can you read the line for me again where I talk about n- n... Is it, "No credible military leader has endorsed these plans"?

    22. SBSteven Bartlett1:05:22

        Yeah. It says, um, "It doesn't matter that no credible military leader has endorsed his plan."

    23. JVJD Vance1:05:27

        Okay. So what I would say is I wrote that, I believed it when I wrote it, and reading it now, I'm almost embarrassed that I wrote it 'cause it was so obviously absurd. In fact, the f- the, the fact that Donald Trump was misaligned with the military experts and the military leadership of 2016 was a good thing, not a bad thing. Think about those military leaders. I mean, I have a lot of respect for the troops, the people who serve, the people who put on a uniform, but you can make a very credible argument that from the early '90s until, you know, at least 2016, America hadn't won a war in 30 years. Like, there's a reason why Donald Trump mistru- mistrusted the military leadership, and he was right. And so much of what I think the president rep- represented at the time was a recognition that American institutions had become sclerotic and broken, and he was a weapon to break down those institutions.

    24. SBSteven Bartlett1:06:29

        Your assessment of him is similar to the Democratic assessment of him. Your assessment of him back in 2016 is similar to the Democratic assessment of him. There, there was a private message between you and a roommate where you, you said he was either a cynical asshole or America's Hitler. How do you go from that position to [chuckles] vice president of the same person? What, what is that journey?

    25. JVJD Vance1:06:51

        A crazy journey, man. But, but again, I mean, i- it's... You have to ask yourself, first of all, I thought Donald Trump would be a failed president if he got elected. He was not. I thought that America's institutions were fundamentally functioning. They were not. I thought that the military leaders who told us this about a war or the scientific e- experts who told us this o- other thing about a pandemic were fundamentally, maybe not always right, but fundamentally wise people who were mostly right.

29. 1:07:20 – 1:09:40

    What You Learned Behind Closed Doors

    1. JVJD Vance1:07:20

       I was wrong.

    2. SBSteven Bartlett1:07:20

       What have you observed behind the scenes that that JD didn't see? So in operation, when you see him making decisions, what do you-

    3. JVJD Vance1:07:28

       Yeah, so I, I mean, I, I want to caveat this with, with saying that, you know, I didn't know him well by the time... You know, I, I voted for him in 2020. Um, obviously, you know, v- very, very involved in the 2024 campaign well before I was ever his vice presidential nominee. I, I had that change based purely on what I saw from the outside. It's not like I had insider knowledge about Donald Trump, and that's what caused me to change. Now, what I will say is that having the insider knowledge, one thing that, that really mistakes or, or gets wrong, that piece in The Atlantic, that's when that, that... That's where that piece was published, is that- Donald Trump is much different as a human being than the media makes him out to be. He's very warm. He's a very, like, loving person to his kids, to his grandkids. He's incredibly generous. Like, if you see Donald Trump, you know, in the Oval Office, it's like he has to give you a gift. Like, he has to, whether it's, you know, a water bottle or a MAGA hat or a coin or a pin. Like, he, he just, he's one of these people who, he really likes hospitality. He really likes making other people happy. I had no understanding of that from him from the outside. What I would see is, you know, clips of him arguing with a journalist, and that was it. And that gives you a very, very one-dimensional view of a person. So yeah, I definitely from the inside have seen a much, much more multidimensional figure. The thing I'd say about, about Donald Trump is I remember this in 2016, and in hindsight it's just so, so dumb. People would say that he was dumb or that he wasn't very smart. He's super smart. Like, he reads a lot. He understands people at an instinctual level better than anybody that I've ever known. But he is a very, very s- Like, from a pure IQ perspective, he's a very smart person, and it's interesting that so many people... Like, you know, if you give Donald Trump an IQ test with the other 45, 46 presidents that the United States has had, I guarantee he, he'd be either near the top or at the top, and the entire American media in 2016 had convinced me at least that he was not a smart person.

30. 1:09:40 – 1:12:01

    The Call To Become Vice President

    1. SBSteven Bartlett1:09:40

       And by 2022, he's endorsed you-

    2. JVJD Vance1:09:42

       Correct

    3. SBSteven Bartlett1:09:42

       ... and you, uh, you win your race in the U- US Senate.

    4. JVJD Vance1:09:45

       Correct.

    5. SBSteven Bartlett1:09:46

       And then sometime after then, um, at some point you're gonna get introduced to him, and he's gonna ask you to be the Vice President of the United States.

    6. JVJD Vance1:09:52

       Yeah.

    7. SBSteven Bartlett1:09:52

       Bring me-- If I was a fly on the wall, was that a phone call, or was it a meeting?

    8. JVJD Vance1:09:55

       Well, there had been meetings before that. Well, uh, just generally at that point, I was involved in his re-election campaign. I was one of the first, maybe the very first senators to endorse him in 2023, I believe, is actually when I endorsed him, very early on in 2023, when again, I, I thought he would win, but the conventional wisdom was that he would not win even the Republican nomination-

    9. SBSteven Bartlett1:10:13

       Mm-hmm

    10. JVJD Vance1:10:13

        ... that his political career was over. So I endorsed him very early. He and I became quite close over, over that period. We talked a lot about issues. He gave me some advice on various bills that I was working on in the Senate. We just became pretty close. He and I worked very closely together over, there was this train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, and he and I became quite, quite close over that. So we just sort of developed a relationship. We were friendly, and then we were closer, and then he was sort of, you know, a person that I really looked to in politics. And then the 2024 campaign really started heating up, and there were all these rumors about possibly me being his running mate. And, you know, he and I didn't ever have that conversation, like, about being his running mate until, like, a day or two before he picked me, and that was an in-person conversation. It was actually the morning he was shot, in person. He goes to that rally in Pennsylvania. He gets shot. Um, obviously is okay, thank God, and then two days later he asked me to be the nominee.

    11. SBSteven Bartlett1:11:09

        So where, where were you when he asked you?

    12. JVJD Vance1:11:12

        Uh, I had just landed in Milwaukee for the RNC convention. It was, uh, there's like a deadline to it, because the way the convention works is you have to be formally nominated by the delegates on Monday at, like, 3:00 or 4:00.

    13. SBSteven Bartlett1:11:23

        Mm-hmm.

    14. JVJD Vance1:11:23

        And it was 11:00. I had just arrived in Milwaukee. I had no idea what was going on, and I thought I had a good chance, but I wasn't sure. And he called me. I didn't answer the phone. Uh, I think that it was like, it was just, it was one of those things where I was getting so many phone calls, and the call went straight to voicemail, like it never rang. And so I get a text message from a friend of mine who's now the White House Chief of Staff, said, "You just missed a very important phone call." I called him back. I said, "What's up, Mr. President?" He said, "JD, you m- just missed a very important phone call. I'm gonna have to pick somebody else now." [laughs]

    15. SBSteven Bartlett1:11:57

        [laughs]

    16. JVJD Vance1:11:59

        Uh, but then he asked me, and the rest is

31. 1:12:01 – 1:13:01

    Ads

    1. JVJD Vance1:12:01

       history, man. [paper flips]

    2. SBSteven Bartlett1:12:02

       For the last couple years, I've been working on something that I realized every podcaster listening to this, but actually probably every creator listening to this, might just need. Podcasting is difficult for many reasons, and one of them is that these hosting platforms don't give you much information. And also, because they're so fragmented, you kind of have to go through every single platform, uploading it to YouTube and then taking the same big old video file and uploading it to Spotify's platform. It takes huge amounts of time, and that friction means most of us don't do it. That is the problem we set out to solve, and so we built something called Flightcast, which you can find at flightcast.com. And today, Flightcast is also one of our show sponsors. And some of the world's biggest podcasters are now using our platform to run their shows because it gives you an edge, it saves you time, it gives you analytics most people won't typically get, it allows you to use AI to be more informed on your show, and it has growth tools that other hosting platforms don't have. So podcasters that are using Flightcast have this unfair advantage. So go to flightcast.com/doac now. [paper flips]

32. 1:13:01 – 1:15:30

    Did You Know What You Were Signing Up For?

    1. SBSteven Bartlett1:13:01

       Did you know at that time what you were signing up for?

    2. JVJD Vance1:13:03

       No, I had no idea. No idea.

    3. SBSteven Bartlett1:13:06

       So why did you want to do it? And y- you know, people say, "I represent my country," but why, why-- It's, it's a lot. It's a big cost to your family. When, when I, when I arrived here today, I saw, I don't know, it felt like 50 men with guns.

    4. JVJD Vance1:13:15

       Probably.

    5. SBSteven Bartlett1:13:16

       Yeah.

    6. JVJD Vance1:13:16

       Yeah.

    7. SBSteven Bartlett1:13:17

       Uh, they, they'd scoped out the whole building.

    8. JVJD Vance1:13:18

       Yeah.

    9. SBSteven Bartlett1:13:18

       They'd been, you know, they'd been searching this building, I think, for a couple of days. And I thought, "Wow," like, how does, how does the vice president live life with his, his family when you have this-

    10. JVJD Vance1:13:30

        Yeah

    11. SBSteven Bartlett1:13:31

        ... going everywhere with you?

    12. JVJD Vance1:13:32

        Yeah.

    13. SBSteven Bartlett1:13:32

        Like, did you know what you were signing up for?

    14. JVJD Vance1:13:34

        No. No, I didn't. I mean, I, you know, you sign up because you want to make a difference and because, you know, I was already a senator, so I'm already in the politics business. I might as well try to serve at the highest level possible. You know, you think you could help, right? Part of the, being the VP is you help on the campaign trail. You, you know, six months, really the part of the campaign that is the most intense is the part where you're sort of riding a sidesaddle with, uh, with the presidential nominee. So there's just, like, all these things for why people get into politics in the first place. But no, I mean, look, I, I'm not a whiner, and I would never complain about this, but if I was a whiner, the one thing I would say is It was very hard on the kids, in particular our oldest son. And I just had no idea what I was getting myself into. I mean, okay, so the president, he and I had this brief phone conversation. You know, my kid is talking to me about Pokemon cards at the hotel in Milwaukee. We're still, like, unpacking our suitcase. And it's like, okay, I'm now the VP nominee. I have to get on my suit. I have to get prepared to be nominated, like, three or four hours later, and all these thoughts are swirling through my head. Knock at the door, and it's the Secret Service, and it's like, "All right, you're under our protection now. We have to move your entire family to the president's hotel so that you're in the same protective bubble." And all of a sudden, I just realized my life is totally different now. It'll never be the same. I, I was okay with that. You know, like, you sort of, you just get used to it. I'm a grown man. But it was very hard on, you know, my, my oldest boy, who's nine years old now.

    15. SBSteven Bartlett1:15:00

        He made a comment, didn't he?

    16. JVJD Vance1:15:01

        Oh yeah, he hated it. He, he hated the attention. He hated how people treated him differently. It was like one of these things where, you know, he would go to a school and people would treat him like he was special, and he just wanted to be a normal kid. And I felt guilty. I felt really guilty about that, and I felt this sort of sense like, oh my God, I've conscripted this kid into this life. I had no idea what he was, he was, what I was signing him up for. He didn't sign up for it. I signed him up for it, and that was

33. 1:15:30 – 1:19:52

    How Becoming VP Changed Your Family

    1. JVJD Vance1:15:30

       pretty tough.

    2. SBSteven Bartlett1:15:31

       "Sometimes I feel like I ruined his life without even asking him."

    3. JVJD Vance1:15:35

       Mm.

    4. SBSteven Bartlett1:15:35

       You write that in your new book, page 198-

    5. JVJD Vance1:15:38

       Yes

    6. SBSteven Bartlett1:15:38

       ... in reference to your seven-year-old son. "Sometimes I feel like I've ruined his life without even asking him."

    7. JVJD Vance1:15:44

       Yeah. Yeah. And that's, that's how, that's how I felt. I mean, I, I think that I've, I've gained certainly some perspective about it. You know, one of the things we've been quite good at is just finding communities where he's more isolated from all the attention and all the pressures of it. You know, we have a very, very good school community for him, a, a Christian school that he goes to and he loves. There's also, by the way, a flip side, is, you know, kids, as you may know, you realize how much nature matters more than nurture. You know, our oldest boy is an introvert. Um, our six-year-old is a little bit more like me. He's a bit of an extrovert. He loves it. And so you, you kind of have to balance the way that it affects the kids. But, you know, I don't feel like I've ruined my nine-year-old's life anymore, but I certainly, at that time, I felt extremely guilty about what I had signed him up for.

    8. SBSteven Bartlett1:16:33

       And in your new book, Communion, you say, "Dad, he..." You quote him and say that he said, "Dad, I just want every- everyone to go back to treating us like they used to."

    9. JVJD Vance1:16:41

       Yes. That's right.

    10. SBSteven Bartlett1:16:42

        Are these, are these things hard to hear? Like, is it hard to-

    11. JVJD Vance1:16:45

        Oh, of course, man. Of course. I mean, you, you know. Do you have kids?

    12. SBSteven Bartlett1:16:48

        Not yet.

    13. JVJD Vance1:16:48

        Okay.

    14. SBSteven Bartlett1:16:48

        But I'm trying. [laughs]

    15. JVJD Vance1:16:49

        Yeah, yeah. [laughs] Good for you. I, you know, my, my prayers for that endeavor. But-

    16. SBSteven Bartlett1:16:52

        Thank you

    17. JVJD Vance1:16:53

        ... I, I think [sighs] your kids have an emotional effect on you that is just totally profound and revelatory, and yeah, man, when, when your son tells you that he wants something that you can no longer provide him, that's a very, very tough thing. Now, the flip side of it is, and you can say this is rationalization, but I think it's true, the flip side is there are a lot of blessings that come along with this life. And, you know, I've talked to him a lot about this. I've actually, you know, I write this in the book, that Charlie Kirk was probably the person who was most influential in helping me think through this conversation is, you know, don't try to pretend that it's not a sacrifice to him. Like, I, you know, don't pretend that you haven't signed him up for something that has changed his life. You have. But I try to talk to him about, well, there are benefits, too. You've gotten to see the world, and you've gotten to see the country in a, in a way that no kid has ever gotten to see it, and we get to live in this cool house. I live in the Naval Observatory here in Washington, D.C. We would not get to do that if I was not the vice president. So what I've, I've, I've learned to do with him is not to minimize the negative, but to try to contextualize it, but also to try to emphasize the positive. And it's funny, you know, I, I asked him this probably about a year ago. I said, "Are, are, are you still unhappy that I became the vice president?" This was probably four or five months in, too. He said, "Absolutely." I asked him that question recently, and he said, "Ah, actually, it's pretty good." So kids adjust, you know, lives change. You figure out a routine for the kids. But I also think that, you know, that, that guilt motivated certain conduct. Would we have built the life that we have around him were it not for this recognition that we had caused this change and this disruption? No. So you take the good with the bad. You accept that you've caused some problems, but you also accept that you can make things better.

    18. SBSteven Bartlett1:18:43

        And lo- lovely photo here of your-

    19. JVJD Vance1:18:45

        [laughs]

    20. SBSteven Bartlett1:18:45

        ... your wife as well.

    21. JVJD Vance1:18:46

        I love this photo. I think she looks beautiful. This is actually the day, or at least the weekend that I met her mom. We were-- This is at the High Line in Brooklyn. Have you ever been to the-

    22. SBSteven Bartlett1:18:55

        High Line, yes

    23. JVJD Vance1:18:55

        ... or not, not in Brooklyn, in South Manhattan. Um-

    24. SBSteven Bartlett1:18:58

        Oh, the High Line, yeah. I ran it that week.

    25. JVJD Vance1:18:59

        Yeah, the High Line park. It's, you know, it, it basically travels a long way up South Manhattan. Uh, there's this little observation deck. We're sitting there taking a photo. And, you know, that, that first summer we were together, we started dating in March of 2011, and so I was doing a research assistant thing in New Haven, Connecticut, about an hour and a half train ride.

    26. SBSteven Bartlett1:19:18

        Mm.

    27. JVJD Vance1:19:18

        She was in New York City. And, um, [lip smacks] you know, it, it, it was in some ways like a metaphor for our relationship because I found New York just this totally intimidating place. I didn't know how to ride the subway. I didn't even know how to, like, buy a subway card to get on the subway. But I was just-- Because I was in love with her, I went down there every chance I could get. We spent every moment... You know, you know, like when you're, when you're, when you're newly in love with somebody, it's just like an obsession. And we sort of explored New York City together as this young couple this summer, and, uh, that was the day that I met her mom, and I passed the test because here

34. 1:19:52 – 1:20:54

    What Surprised Your Wife Most

    1. JVJD Vance1:19:52

       I am.

    2. SBSteven Bartlett1:19:52

       What surprised her most about you becoming the vice president? What, what, what didn't she expect?

    3. JVJD Vance1:19:58

       She doesn't get surprised by much, so that's actually a very, very hard question. I do think the Secret Service protection surprised her, too, the way that it changes your life. And like, to give you an example, so, you know, we went to Rome [clears throat] for the Pope's inaugural mass, the new pope, the American pope. And like my favorite thing to do in the world, like if you said, "I'll give you two hours, you can do whatever you want," what I would do is I would go to some place, whether in the country or in a big city, and I would just take a walk with Usha. Like that's, that, that is my ultimate way to like vacation or to relax. And you know, we try to take a walk in Rome and it was like, you know, Seal Team Six had des- descended upon Rome. They were shutting down every traffic intersection. There's a helicopter flying overhead. And just th- I think that's surprising to her how much the security protocols have changed just the way that, you know, we, we do things like take a walk together.

35. 1:20:54 – 1:22:18

    Does The Secret Service Control Your Life?

    1. SBSteven Bartlett1:20:54

       Can you make that decision still yourself? Could you, could you say to all these Secret Service people, there's none... Okay, I can't see any Secret Service at the moment-

    2. JVJD Vance1:21:01

       [laughs]

    3. SBSteven Bartlett1:21:01

       ... but I know they're behind that curtain.

    4. JVJD Vance1:21:02

       They're all behind the curtain.

    5. SBSteven Bartlett1:21:03

       Yeah. [laughs]

    6. JVJD Vance1:21:03

       Yeah.

    7. SBSteven Bartlett1:21:03

       And I know they're throughout the building.

    8. JVJD Vance1:21:05

       Don't say anything. [laughs]

    9. SBSteven Bartlett1:21:05

       Yeah, they're outside, they're everywhere. They're probably on the roof. But can you just... Are you the one that still gets to make the call of, of what you want to do? So could you say, "Listen, I'm, I wanna walk down the street to Walmart"?

    10. JVJD Vance1:21:15

        Uh, there are actually like statutory prohibitions. Like they, they, they have legal obligations in order to protect me. They are, I would say, great people, amazing people, and we've found accommodation. Like we've found a way of taking a walk without disrupting everybody, right? But it's taken a little bit of work and a little bit of practice. And the, the biggest change is just, again, it's not that you can't take a walk, it's that the basic protocol, the thing that they've gotten used to, is much different and m- more misaligned with the way that we wanna live our lives. So we've figured it out, like we've gotten things to a good place. But in the, in the, in the first instance, man, it was crazy.

    11. SBSteven Bartlett1:21:52

        I c- I just couldn't imagine. It was actually getting here today, like you hear about Secret Service, but when you... As someone like me who, I was here yesterday, so making my way into this building today, which is like our studio-

    12. JVJD Vance1:22:01

        Yeah

    13. SBSteven Bartlett1:22:01

        ... I couldn't believe it. I was being tapped down, pocket checked.

    14. JVJD Vance1:22:04

        Yeah, yeah.

    15. SBSteven Bartlett1:22:04

        People were handing me stuff, "Keep this on." Uh, I went downstairs to the toilet in the basement, there was a guy down there with a gun. I was like [laughs] I was like, there was a guy outside my door with a gun. The gun's go-

    16. JVJD Vance1:22:13

        Yeah

    17. SBSteven Bartlett1:22:13

        ... I was like, "Wow, this is-"

    18. JVJD Vance1:22:14

        You've never been safer than you are right now. [laughs]

    19. SBSteven Bartlett1:22:15

        I've never been... Yeah, I do feel safe. Yeah,

36. 1:22:18 – 1:24:19

    Why Faith Came Back Into Your Life

    1. SBSteven Bartlett1:22:18

       yeah. Um, you've written this new book called Communion.

    2. JVJD Vance1:22:21

       Yeah.

    3. SBSteven Bartlett1:22:21

       Which is about... It's, I mean, the subtitle is Finding My Way Back to Faith. Back to faith?

    4. JVJD Vance1:22:27

       Yeah, that's right.

    5. SBSteven Bartlett1:22:28

       So through your 30s you, you, you became atheist. In your, in your early, your late 20s?

    6. JVJD Vance1:22:34

       Yeah, I would say my 20s. Even in, yeah, in my early 20s. So I was raised in an evangelical household, very conservative, you know, very evangelical Christianity. My grandmother was one of these people, you know, she read the Bible five, six times a day. She prayed five, six times a day. Was, was a woman, you know, Mamaw was, was devoutly religious. But we were what you, you would call unchurched. So I would go to church with my dad. I would occasionally go to church with my mom, occasionally with my mamaw. But you know, our religion was very much experienced at home. It was you would watch televangelists on TV. Uh, you would watch Billy Graham revival, um, things on TV, but we didn't go to church that much. And so, you know, I got to a point in my life where I, I just felt like my faith wasn't speaking to me anymore. It didn't seem to have particular relevance to my life. There was a certain, you know, new atheist element to it where I assumed that I knew more than these, you know, bumpkins that had raised me and, you know, her faith is all superstition. I'm rational and I'm a college-educated kid, and I know things that other people don't. So there's a certain intellectual arrogance that was built into it, but sort of all these things kind of swam together. But fundamentally, I, I think that the y- with all love and affection to my grandmother, I, I think the thing about my faith that just never took root is that I never saw why it actually mattered that much. It was just a thing. It was in the background. It was something we believed. I mean, I really did believe this stuff when I was a teenager, but it didn't really matter. And so when that boy collided with reality and collided with a lot of things that were going on in the world, I just was not properly prepared to actually integrate my faith into this new

37. 1:24:19 – 1:28:11

    When You Realized Faith Matters

    1. JVJD Vance1:24:19

       world.

    2. SBSteven Bartlett1:24:19

       When did you realize that it mattered?

    3. JVJD Vance1:24:21

       Well, well, so, so okay, so, so I become an atheist. I'm o- I'm sort of one of these like angry atheists, you know, where I'll like argue with people who say that they're religious-

    4. SBSteven Bartlett1:24:31

       Yeah

    5. JVJD Vance1:24:31

       ... and I, I pretend that I'm smarter than everybody else, and it was like very embarrassing in hindsight. But you know, I, I, I go back and so just a flaw that I have, all of us have many flaws, many virtues, but a flaw that I have is I just, I wanted to rise above. Now, where it came from a good place is I wanted stability, I wanted a decent income. I wanted to provide my kids that stability that I didn't have. But where it was a very bad thing is I cared way too much about what credentials I had. Where did I go to school? How much money that I made? And so this sort of new atheism actually was like the perfect philosophy for the creed of a kid who just wanted to get ahead. I wanted to make as much money. I wanted to have the most prestigious profession. I was super ambitious for ambition's sake. And you know, so I, I had won every competition that life had put before me. You know, I'm, I'm at this point in my late 20s, I've got a beautiful girlfriend. Things are going pretty well. I'm at Yale Law School, right? The top law school in the United States of America. Very prestigious. Everybody thought I was very smart because I went to Yale Law School, and I cared about that back then. I don't care about it now. And I sort of realized I'm actually not like a happy person. I'm not a good person. I care about where I went to law school way more than whether I'm good to this girl, right? I mean, like, like I, I really was like madly in love with her, but was I like a particularly good boyfriend? No. I, I had learned from my youth to be chaotic, and I'd threaten to break up with her every other month and, you know, if we had an argument, I'd just like disappear for a couple of days. I mean, I was just like not... And I, I sort of realized, okay, there's something missing here. There's something that all of this obsession with achievement and being smarter than everybody else and being rational It has not actually made me a good person. And I sort of looked around and said, "Well, who are the people that I, like, actually wanna be like? Who are the people that I most admire in the world?" And I slowly realized that the ones who are the most virtuous, the ones who are the best at the things that actually mattered, they were Christians. And their faith motivated not an obsession with getting ahead, but an obsession with treating people well, or an obsession with developing the strength of character that mattered so that you could withstand, you know, very tough circumstances. And I started to think to myself, "Okay, wait a second. There's, like, these rays of sunshine from Christians that I knew in my life, from Christian ideas that sort of were in the background of my own, you know, intellectual curiosity. And if there are all of these rays of sunshine where Christianity seems to be warmer and truer than something else, maybe the rest of it actually has something to be said for it, too." And that kinda led me down a pathway of thinking about my faith in a way that I never had when I was a teenager. I never had to when I was a teenager. And it finally just hit me, like, there is something deeply profound about this. And at first it was an intellectual thing, right? But over time it became a more emotional and more practice thing, and eventually I got baptized. I'd never been baptized as a kid. And, you know, even though [chuckles] my wife is not Christian, I force, force her to take, take, take, uh, our three kids and husband to, to, to church every single week, and she's remarkably patient about it. But it's, it's, it's one of these things where it really did transform me, but in a slower way.

    6. SBSteven Bartlett1:27:59

       A-atheism is a form of religion in a, in a way, isn't it?

    7. JVJD Vance1:28:01

       Exactly.

    8. SBSteven Bartlett1:28:02

       It has the same level of sort of certainty. And that's-

    9. JVJD Vance1:28:04

       That's exactly right

    10. SBSteven Bartlett1:28:05

        ... that's why I introduced myself to you as an agnostic-

    11. JVJD Vance1:28:06

        Yeah

    12. SBSteven Bartlett1:28:07

        ... 'cause it, it feels a little bit arrogant to say that I know.

    13. JVJD Vance1:28:09

        Yeah. Yeah, no, that's-

    14. SBSteven Bartlett1:28:10

        You know, so

    15. JVJD Vance1:28:10

        ... that's, that's interesting.

38. 1:28:11 – 1:28:57

    What AI Means For America's Future

    1. SBSteven Bartlett1:28:11

       I'm gonna take a little bit of a hard turn-

    2. JVJD Vance1:28:13

       [laughs]

    3. SBSteven Bartlett1:28:13

       ... which is, uh, AI. [laughs] AI's gonna cause a lot of job disruption.

    4. JVJD Vance1:28:16

       Sure.

    5. SBSteven Bartlett1:28:17

       And, um-

    6. JVJD Vance1:28:18

       Yeah

    7. SBSteven Bartlett1:28:18

       ... it's a big topic of conversation for my audience, but also, uh, as an entrepreneur and investor, we, we're talking a lot at the moment about the impact of AI. When you look at the, the words of the big AI CEOs over time-

    8. JVJD Vance1:28:28

       Yeah

    9. SBSteven Bartlett1:28:28

       ... one thing I find fascinating is if you look at Sam Altman's words about the impact AI is gonna have-

    10. JVJD Vance1:28:32

        Sure

    11. SBSteven Bartlett1:28:32

        ... it's very dystopian. You look at Elon, very, very dystopian.

    12. JVJD Vance1:28:35

        Yeah.

    13. SBSteven Bartlett1:28:35

        And right now, I think the only thing that's up there with being as unpopular as AI is ICE-

    14. JVJD Vance1:28:42

        [laughs]

    15. SBSteven Bartlett1:28:43

        ... in the US. I saw, uh, this graph the other day in terms of how unpopular it is. Eric Schmidt, who I know you know because he was an investor in your company, I believe-

    16. JVJD Vance1:28:51

        Yeah. Yeah

    17. SBSteven Bartlett1:28:52

        ... the other day when he was doing that commencement speech in front of the college students, he was booed every time-

    18. JVJD Vance1:28:56

        Got booed

    19. SBSteven Bartlett1:28:56

        ... he said the word.

    20. JVJD Vance1:28:56

        That's right.

39. 1:28:57 – 1:37:45

    Are You Worried About AI Job Loss?

    1. SBSteven Bartlett1:28:58

       Are you scared about the potential economic impact and unemployment impact of artificial intelligence at this moment in time?

    2. JVJD Vance1:29:05

       So I'd say I'm less scared about that than I am about other things.

    3. SBSteven Bartlett1:29:07

       Okay.

    4. JVJD Vance1:29:08

       Okay. So historical analogies are always fraught. And by the way, I think the AI companies themselves, the CEOs, there's a certain incentive to be super dystopian-

    5. SBSteven Bartlett1:29:19

       Yeah

    6. JVJD Vance1:29:19

       ... because it's, it's like a form of viral marketing, that if people are really scared of your product, that must mean that it really works. And if they're not scared of your product, maybe it actually doesn't work that well. So I think there's something weird... There, there's something synergistic about the most pessimistic predictions about AI and some of the people who are making them. But, like, set that to the side 'cause I, I do have some real concerns. But on the job displacement thing, okay, so let me back up for a second because I bring a certain bias to this. So when I was... Again, this is a, this is an almost religious idea that I developed in the early 2010s that I think is just preposterous now. And that religious idea was that there was, like, this inevitable march of economics from agricultural to industrial to service-based.

    7. SBSteven Bartlett1:30:07

       Mm-hmm.

    8. JVJD Vance1:30:07

       And the reason that all of my friends and family were losing their jobs was because that was just an inevitable economic trend that advanced economies, they de-industrialized, okay? And there was even this argument at the time that the reason why manufacturing employment was going down in the United States was because of automation, because of technology, that it had nothing to do with outsourcing or with immigration, but it was purely because of technology had replaced all these workers with robots. I think that story is totally false. Now, the robots that exist in manufacturing, did they make people more productive? Absolutely. Did they cause a change in what a manufacturing line work was doing in, say, 2005 versus 1955? Absolutely. So the change is there. But in reality, there was a ton of manufacturing job growth. It just wasn't happening in the United States of America. And I think sometimes we tell ourselves a story that technology always leads inevitably to job loss to make up for the fact that what often leads to job loss among populations is either outsourcing or immigration. You ship the job to another country, or you have somebody else take the job of somebody who currently has it. So what do I think is actually going on with AI? Uh, y-you know, if you go back to the Industrial Revolution, right, the last significant major disruption in the labor market, you actually had way more people working at the end of the Industrial Revolution than you did beforehand. Again, some of the jobs were different. There was some job disruption. But when I look at AI, I don't see mass unemployment as the most likely consequence. I think people will become more productive. I think some people's jobs will change. Some people will lose their jobs. But I, I just don't buy this idea, and I haven't seen any evidence in the data that it's gonna lead to mass unemployment. Let me tell you what it does, what does worry me. Again, historical analogies are always fraught. You go back to the Industrial Revolution. Was mass joblessness the main consequence of the shift from an agricultural to an industrial economy? No. But what did happen? Rich people got way richer, and that led to, in Europe- Fascism and communism, in fact, your country and my country are pretty much the only two countries that successfully avoided either a fascist or communist revolution in the, in response to the Industrial Revolution. That's, by the way, one of the real interesting things about, you know, Christianity is the, the seminal text about how capital and labor could work together, about how you could have social harmony, compared to Marx, who was sort of saying there was an inevitable social division, was Pope Leo XIII, who wrote in his famous encyclical that the way to preserve harmony between the social classes was to ensure that the workers could bargain. This is where sort of the idea of collective bargaining had a Christian underpinning. And to make sure that the, the capitalists weren't able to take advantage of the workers, they had to sort of respect them. And that, that, that model of social harmony, I think, is something we're either gonna follow, that Christian concept of social harmony in the age of AI, or we're gonna wake up and we're gonna realize that rich people have gotten way richer. The average American, the average Brit, the average Western society member has stagnated, and people really hate relative poverty. You can give people iPhones, and you can give the cr- people the creature comforts of a 21st century economy. But if you make rich people way richer, you are gonna have significant problems. And so I think that is, like, one of the consequences that I see from AI. The, the one other, just 'cause you asked about it, the other thing I really wor-worry about with AI is surveillance. AI is, you know, fr- a friend of mine once said that AI is fundamentally a communist technology in that it allows governments and corporations to surveil people in very profound and different ways, and that scares me a lot. Like, I don't want a social credit system that's powered by AI. I don't want you to not be able to buy a beer because some tech CEO has given you a score based on an artificial intelligence algorithm that nobody actually understands. That scares me, too. But I don't think we're gonna have mass unemployment. We might have mass inequality. That's its own problem. It's a different problem, though.

    9. SBSteven Bartlett1:34:30

       Um, according to the, the current 2026 Federal Res-Res-Reserve and Census Bureau data, financial inequality in the United States has reached its highest level in nearly four decades. And obviously we've seen this headline this week of the US' first trillionaire-

    10. JVJD Vance1:34:43

        Yeah

    11. SBSteven Bartlett1:34:43

        ... which again, has been talked about everywhere around the world-

    12. JVJD Vance1:34:45

        Sure

    13. SBSteven Bartlett1:34:45

        ... and has now sparked this debate. You think about the, the explosion we're seeing in robo-robotics and Elon Musk's pay packet rewarding him for getting a, a, a million humanoid robots out there at, at a certain timeline, and Elon himself saying there'll be a billion humanoid robots at some point. There'll be more humanoid robots than humans. It appears to me that there will be some kind of job disruption. We can-- Obviously, there's new jobs created, which are, like, hard to forecast.

    14. JVJD Vance1:35:08

        Yeah.

    15. SBSteven Bartlett1:35:09

        And you've got these big, like, um, frontier model companies like OpenAI, Anthropic-

    16. JVJD Vance1:35:14

        Sure

    17. SBSteven Bartlett1:35:14

        ... that are gonna be benef-benefactors of this-

    18. JVJD Vance1:35:17

        Correct

    19. SBSteven Bartlett1:35:17

        ... evolution. Wealth is presumably gonna accrue to these large, large corporations, the Metas, the Anthropics, the OpenAIs. How do you think about-- We already, we already have crazy, crazy inequality. How do you think about redistributing that wealth? Bernie Sanders is saying people need to own 50% of these-

    20. JVJD Vance1:35:34

        Yeah

    21. SBSteven Bartlett1:35:34

        ... AI companies. What is your-

    22. JVJD Vance1:35:35

        Which the president, by the way, likes that idea, too.

    23. SBSteven Bartlett1:35:37

        He likes it? Okay.

    24. JVJD Vance1:35:37

        He likes that idea. Um, I don't know that he would say 50%, but he does like that idea. So there, there's a, um, there's a concept in, uh, in, in, like, the social welfare literature of redistribution versus pre-distribution. The idea of pre-distribution is that you give workers and you give people, normal people, a seat at the bargaining table. And I don't think it's just economic. The economic thing, by the way, is very important. Like you, you, you want the, the, the worker whose life has been transformed by this technology to have a seat at the table. You want them to be able to actually bargain with the company for better wages. Now, that's impossible if you think about it, like the individual worker to negotiate against, you know, Dario from Anthropic. It's not gonna happen. But workers working together, this is where the idea of collective bargaining came from. But there's all kinds of interesting things, and again, I, I think there's like a deeply Christian concept to this. I know you're sort of, you know, fascinated by faith, but not a person of faith yourself. There is a very deeply Christian concept that you have to give everybody in the country a seat at the table. So for example, like, okay, there's the economic piece of it. What about the cultural piece of it? How will AI transform the culture that we consume, that we distribute, that we make? You know, back in the '50s and '60s, it was broadly accepted that... Now, it wasn't a censorship regime. There was nothing legal going on here. But it was broadly accepted that Hollywood would consult with the religious leaders at the time in order to ensure that the content they were making was actually consistent with the sensibilities of their membership and consistent with some basic Christian ideas. Again, that wasn't forced, but there was this mechanism that gave everybody a seat at the table, and I think that's one of the, the bad things about the de- there are many bad things about decline of institutional Christianity in this country, but we do not have a mechanism that gives powerful people, that forces them to actually work with everybody else.

    25. SBSteven Bartlett1:37:36

        So do you think-

    26. JVJD Vance1:37:37

        Religion was one of the ways that happened in the West. I think probably, probably the most profound and effective way that happened in the West. We just don't have it anymore, and I really worry

40. 1:37:45 – 1:39:21

    Should America Own The Biggest AI Companies?

    1. JVJD Vance1:37:45

       about that.

    2. SBSteven Bartlett1:37:45

       So the president is supportive of, of the United States owning these big AI companies?

    3. JVJD Vance1:37:50

       He likes the idea as sort of a sovereign wealth fund idea-

    4. SBSteven Bartlett1:37:53

       Hmm

    5. JVJD Vance1:37:53

       ... of the United States taking some stake in these AI companies. He's, he's said so publicly. I'm not breaking news. But, you know, the, again, the, the president, he is a very unconventional person. You would say a Republican's not supposed to think like that. The president doesn't care. The president just thinks the thoughts that he has. He develops them, whether they're, you know, he, he, he, he tries to determine, is this a good idea or a bad idea? I would ca-call him sort of a ra-radical pragmatist, though I think most Europeans think that he's this hyper-ideological person. He's extremely pragmatic about this stuff. But, but, but one, one, one very important thought. The idea that we're gonna allow these companies, let's say 10, 20 years down the road, to accumulate trillions and trillions and trillions of dollars of wealth, and then we're gonna be able, be able to successfully redistribute it to workers, I'm very skeptical of that. Very skeptical of that. I think that's, that's a, that's a very modern, I call it a liberal concept, this idea that you can just tax people and give it to poor people, and it works out. Then you turn the poor people into effectively subservience of the rich people. You have to give everybody a stake in the society. I haven't quite figured out how this is gonna work in the age of AI. I think labor unions are a very important model here, but this is... The, the, the model where you just take from some people and give to other people, that's never provided a stable society. You've gotta give the workers a seat at the table.

41. 1:39:21 – 1:43:09

    What Mamaw Would Think Today

    1. SBSteven Bartlett1:39:22

       Mamaw. Mamaw?

    2. JVJD Vance1:39:23

       Mamaw.

    3. SBSteven Bartlett1:39:24

       Mamaw.

    4. JVJD Vance1:39:26

       Mamaw.

    5. SBSteven Bartlett1:39:26

       She passed away when you were 21 years old.

    6. JVJD Vance1:39:27

       Correct.

    7. SBSteven Bartlett1:39:27

       Rushed to hospital with a collapsed lung two days after her 72nd birthday-

    8. JVJD Vance1:39:32

       Yep

    9. SBSteven Bartlett1:39:33

       ... and she was taken off life support. She was clearly the most important, um, figure in your life from reading your story for so many reasons.

    10. JVJD Vance1:39:38

        Sure.

    11. SBSteven Bartlett1:39:39

        She hasn't gotten to see the, the position you've rose to today.

    12. JVJD Vance1:39:42

        Yeah.

    13. SBSteven Bartlett1:39:43

        I read that you didn't cry when she passed away. Um, you didn't process those emotions either because you sensed that your entire family was on the verge of collapse-

    14. JVJD Vance1:39:52

        Ooh

    15. SBSteven Bartlett1:39:52

        ... and you wanted to give the impression of emotional strength. That's what you say in your book-

    16. JVJD Vance1:39:56

        Yep

    17. SBSteven Bartlett1:39:57

        ... um, Hillbilly on, on page 169. What would she think of you today?

    18. JVJD Vance1:40:03

        [laughs]

    19. SBSteven Bartlett1:40:03

        What, what would she have said?

    20. JVJD Vance1:40:05

        Well, I think, you know, she, she, she was, again, a deeply patriotic person. I think she'd be amazed by this. I mean, the, the pageantry, being able to go to the White House, just things like that would've been very, very meaningful to her. Um-

    21. SBSteven Bartlett1:40:18

        What would you say to her?

    22. JVJD Vance1:40:20

        I think that I would say thank you. I mean, the, the, the, the through... The, maybe the most important l- lesson that I've learned is that the difference between good people and people who struggle is good people have a good sense of gratitude, and I don't know that I would be alive were it not for this woman. I certainly wouldn't be here. And I think the, the one thing Mamaw would worry about, and I think I've done a pretty good job, just to be clear, but Mamaw would worry a lot about the pomp and the circumstance. In the same way that she would be amazed by it, she would find it incredible, and she would love to participate and see it, she's always really, really worried. She would always say, "Don't get too big for your britches." And what that means is, don't let it go to your head. Don't think that you're better than somebody just because you have a title or because you have more money than they do. And I think that I, I have to constantly remind myself that I get to be vice president for four years. I'm gonna do as good of a job as I can for that four years, but it doesn't make me better than anybody, and it doesn't mean that I know more than anybody.

    23. SBSteven Bartlett1:41:25

        Have you-

    24. JVJD Vance1:41:25

        I mean, I may know more about like CIA reports, but fundamentally, i- if you start to see yourself, I think, as better, you become unable to successfully govern a democratic country.

    25. SBSteven Bartlett1:41:38

        Have you ever grieved the loss of Mamaw? Because-

    26. JVJD Vance1:41:40

        Oh, absolutely. I mean, I, you know, I think I wrote in the book, I didn't cry when she died. I, I cried a lot two days later. Yeah, I mean, I've, I've grieved, I've grieved her for a long time. I mean, my, my biggest regret with Mamaw is just she never met Usha. [sighs] And there's something so similar about them but so different. Like, they're both incredibly smart. Even though Mamaw left school, middle school, Usha went to law school. They're incredibly blunt people, right? I mean, Usha just doesn't have a filter. It's one of the things I, I was immediately attracted to about her, is that even if she was gonna offend you, she was gonna say exactly what was on her mind, but they came from such different worlds, and I think my grandmother would be fascinated by her. You know, when Mom met Usha, and you know, Usha ethnically is Indian. She was born in the United States, but you know, my mom said, it just goes to show sometimes how, how, uh, how little some of us knew about the world. She said, "You know, what is she, like ethnically?" And I said, "Mom, she's Indian." And my mom says, "Which tribe?" [laughs] So they came from very different worlds, both Mom and Usha, but also Mamaw and Usha, but that, that is the biggest regret about her death is that, you know, if she was the most important person in my life for the first 20 years, Usha's the most important for the rest of it, and I really wish those two people could've met 'cause they're amazing people.

    27. SBSteven Bartlett1:43:05

        The emotions still right on the surface for you-

    28. JVJD Vance1:43:07

        Very much so

    29. SBSteven Bartlett1:43:07

        ... obviously.

42. 1:43:09 – 1:47:43

    Are Aliens Real?

    1. SBSteven Bartlett1:43:10

       We have a closing tradition on this podcast-

    2. JVJD Vance1:43:12

       Okay

    3. SBSteven Bartlett1:43:12

       ... where the last guest leaves a question-

    4. JVJD Vance1:43:13

       [laughs]

    5. SBSteven Bartlett1:43:14

       ... for the next, next guest, not knowing who they're leaving it for.

    6. JVJD Vance1:43:16

       Okay.

    7. SBSteven Bartlett1:43:17

       The question that's left for you is, uh, I think it was slightly biased, but the question is, are aliens real?

    8. JVJD Vance1:43:24

       [laughs]

    9. SBSteven Bartlett1:43:24

       [laughs]

    10. JVJD Vance1:43:27

        That's interesting. The answer is I don't know. It, it is, it is something that I have sworn to myself, I'm now a year and a half into this job, that I would go through all of the highly classified information about everything that we know about UFOs. I just haven't done it yet. It's like one of these crazy things where you get in the job, and the day-to-day just takes over. So I haven't done that yet, but I mean, look, I, I am... I believe in things, and I think that they're true, and I think that they're rational, but I recognize that there may be even crazier than the idea that there are extraterrestrials. Like, I believe that a Jewish man about 2,000 years ago was the only begotten Son of God, was literally crucified, and then rose from the dead three days later. Like, I recognize that sounds a little out there, but I think that it's true, and I 100% believe that people have mystical experiences. I mean, I've s- I've talked to people who have in, been involved in exorcisms, and again, I think the rational mind says, "Well, that's just schizophrenia, or that's some other mental illness." I've talked to people who said, "Yeah, 99.9% of the people that I've looked at to do an exorcism on were schizophrenic or had some other mental illness." But there's something, there are weird things out there that we cannot explain. There are weird moments. I mean, I remember not long after my grandmother died, my sister lost, you know- She doesn't really lose her temper, but like got kind of angry with her daughter, and her daughter's, I don't know, seven or eight years old at the time, and like the light bulb just exploded. And both of us looked at each other like, "That was Mamaw." Remember I was talking, I, I write about this in Communion. I was talking to the New York Times writer, um, about the Pope and sort of different perspectives on the Pope, and he was more critical of the Pope, and I was more, my attitude was like, "Ah, you know, he's not a politician. You can't judge him by politician standards. This is the last pope." And we're like having this conversation and it's like, I'm telling you, man, a glass just falls off the bar in a totally crazy way and shatters and like stops us dead in our tracks. So we both just looked at each other and said, "What the hell was that?" And I, I, I'm a believer in mystical experiences. I don't think they happen that often, but I think that people have experiences that are impossible to explain if you have a purely narrow, hyper-rational view of the world. In other words, I think the hyper-rational view of the world is actually not totally accurate. There's some weird shit out there.

    11. SBSteven Bartlett1:45:49

        So you think aliens could be real?

    12. JVJD Vance1:45:50

        I do.

    13. SBSteven Bartlett1:45:52

        Communion. Um, it's really interesting because I, I, I went on a similar journey to you in terms of new atheism, very rational, how could any of this be true-

    14. JVJD Vance1:46:02

        Yeah

    15. SBSteven Bartlett1:46:02

        ... arguing with Christians every time that I had the opportunity to.

    16. JVJD Vance1:46:04

        Sure.

    17. SBSteven Bartlett1:46:04

        In, in part to try and figure out my own opinion.

    18. JVJD Vance1:46:06

        Yeah, yeah.

    19. SBSteven Bartlett1:46:06

        It was like a sparring match.

    20. JVJD Vance1:46:07

        Of course.

    21. SBSteven Bartlett1:46:08

        Um, and I now find myself as being an agnostic person and being open-minded and curious to new ideas, and I've... It's almost a humility-

    22. JVJD Vance1:46:15

        Mm-hmm

    23. SBSteven Bartlett1:46:15

        ... that I wasn't humble before in that, in that season of my life, but now I'm like open that I could be completely wrong-

    24. JVJD Vance1:46:19

        Sure

    25. SBSteven Bartlett1:46:20

        ... and listening intently. And I think this is why this book is so interesting because you represent, I think, the journey of a lot of people who have rationally talked themselves out of the possibility of faith, but then have felt something-

    26. JVJD Vance1:46:32

        Yeah

    27. SBSteven Bartlett1:46:33

        ... is missing at some level, feel like they've been lied to by themselves or society or some kind of culture.

    28. JVJD Vance1:46:39

        Sure.

    29. SBSteven Bartlett1:46:39

        And then have o- had this sort of open-minded exploration back to a place of meaning. And I'd say that that meaning and that sense of purpose is so absent in society at the moment. And also, like you said, the Christians that I've interviewed here, it doesn't feel to me to be a coincidence that they're the most virtuous, anchored, stable-

    30. JVJD Vance1:46:58

        Sure

Episode duration: 1:47:44